Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body

By Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body maps the body through poems, prose, essays, and stories. The Lesbian Body navigates elegance, vulnerability, and endurance found in the flesh. These poems and narratives connect bodies and how lesbians live through them; they express how lesbian bodies become both literal expressions of a truly lived life and the ground metaphor for lesbian being. Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body documents how struggles, interactions, and words shape the relationship lesbians have with their bodies and physical selves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Mar 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781944981181

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

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Contents

Notes for a Magazine 

Notes for a Special Issue 

Sarah Fonseca

Two Prongs Through the Same Eyelet: Body Conscious Tools 

Donika Kelly

Bedtime Story for the Bruised-Hearted

Cartography as an act of remembering 

The Three Birds of the Milky Way

Labyrinth

Amber Carpenter

 Male  Female

Joanna Eleftheriou

You Ask 

Taijhet Nyobi

A Moon Memory of You

Natural Disaster

Breaks and Orbits

She Fills the Room

Share

Sheri Reynolds

South of the Border

Sarah Sarai

On the Shelving Cart 

Hatred Is a Death Threat

Red Washburn

Cherry Blossom Branch 

Sally Lilychild Willowbee

The Things I Talked My Mother Into 

Cathleen Rhodes

Chasing My Own Dyke History Through Other

Women’s Life Stories 

Maureen Seaton

The Drama of the Departed Heroine

Notes on Ash Wednesday 

Distillation of Matter 

Stevie Jones

On Touch 

Mary Meriam

There So Alone 

Amy 

Tanya Frank

Sunday Girl 

Martha K. Davis

Swimming 

Invoking the Muse

Gillian P. Herbert

Twin Beds 

Ladies 

Liz Ahl

Ultrasound 

Extraction 

Home from Traveling 

Shearing

Rift 

M.P. Clark

Jason Means Healer 

Flint

Homemade Recipe To Become The Slut You Are So Bent

On Becoming 

those slow virginia rivers 

Jen Rouse

Inside the Untoward .

Ire of Teeth 

Birthday Horses 

Loyal 

LB Johnston

Ella/Flashbacks 

Anne Shaw

The Body and I Have Insomnia on Our Birthday 

The Body and I Do Not Need Couples Therapy 

Betsy Snider

You Would Have Me Love 

Partner 

Amy Lauren

The Question 

Love on the Brick Streets 

Baptismal

Julie Marie Wade

Split

Teya Schaffer

Who without Whom: 1991-2016

Vi Khi Nao

Lady Gaga Apples

Arianne V. Benford

How To Dress For The Day 

What I Didn’t Say

Liz Asch

To Leave These Grounds 

Jenny Factor

Amma’s Love Lesson

On Not Aiming for What You Really Want

Bed Song, 10 a.m.

The Mourning Dove

Pen Pals 

Kimberly Dark

Thighs and Freedom

Laurel Nakanishi

Photo: Haole Teeth

Correspondence: Self-portrait in Nicaragua with Egret 

Correspondence: Nicaragua: A Return to the Closet

Ayasha Guerin

Split Hairs Into Oil

Book Reviews

Contributor Notes

Notes for a Magazine

In 2013, Tara Shea Burke’s poem, Fall, won the second prize in the Split This Rock poetry Contest. The poem began with this line, When we met we fell for each other like leaves and ended with this tercet:

like most things that live in the raw honey between extremes. We were two women finding beauty in clichés, in differences, in overlaps, the sweet burn of sun on our skin as we fell to the ground.

Like many experiences these days, I read the poem on my computer screen after learning of it in an email. The poem dazzled me, and I thought, I have to know this poet; she must be my friend. I wanted to transform the ephemeral electronic experience into an embodied friendship. I sent Tara Shea Burke a congratulatory email. Those electrons sparked a friendship and ignited this extraordinary new issue of Sinister Wisdom.

Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body revisits a theme woven through all previous one hundred five issues of the journal. How does lesbian become embodied? How is lesbian as an identity bound to embodiment? Where does lesbian map onto the body and like what does this mapping feel? Where do our bodies and our identities connect and where do they diverge? For more than forty years, lesbians have been writing about and around these questions within the pages of this journal. Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body renews these questions and these conversations with new energy, spirit and gusto. I am thrilled about the voices that Tara brings into this conversation, excited by the continued attention to lesbian, to body, to the concatenation of the two: lesbian body.

In preparing this issue for publication, I returned to Sinister Wisdom 49, also titled, The Lesbian Body. Published in 1993, Sinister Wisdom 49 is dedicated to the memory and inspiration of Audre Lorde, who died in 1992. The issue opens with this couple from Lorde’s poem Meet," published in Sinister Wisdom 3 in 1977:

I have heard you calling

across this land in my blood

Twenty-five years since that issue on the lesbian body and forty years since Sinister Wisdom published Lorde’s poem, Sinister Wisdom still hears lesbians calling across this land in our blood.

Appearing in the fall of 2017, Sinister Wisdom 106: The Lesbian Body coincides with our fall fundraiser. The past year was an extraordinary one for Sinister Wisdom: we published four stellar issues that connected with readers and supporters of the journal. Subscriptions to Sinister Wisdom are growing. We have a website that houses a complete archive of the journal—and are distributing our back issues to young lesbians hungry for the voices of lesbians and for the unique theory, analysis, and story found in the pages of Sinister Wisdom. More lesbians are finding the journal, reading the journal, and responding to it as an important voice for lesbians today. The continued work of Sinister Wisdom relies on donations from readers and supporters like you. I hope you will take a few moments to give as generously as you can to Sinister Wisdom. I have great issues planned for 2018 and need your support to make it all happen.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

Fall 2017

Notes for a Special Issue

When Julie asked me to guest edit a special issue, I immediately knew I wanted to collect narratives about the body. I feel the most home in my own body, in my own life, when I’m connected to real human stories. When I read clear, visceral poetry and narrative that invokes body and relationships based in deep human truths, I know why I believe in language and humanity: life is stored and expressed through the body.

When lesbians share our stories—our desires for mundanity and domesticity, our expressions of home, our quest for safety and also rejection of societal norms, the very humanity in our relationships and the way lesbians create connections, our bodies and the way we praise them, expand in them, reject them and reform them, our full expressions of lesbianism intertwined with our complicated and sometimes fluid expressions of gender identity—when we share our stories about sex and vulvas, trauma and fierce joy, something special happens. We claim space that neither negates other spaces, nor shrivels and withers in the face of oppression. The lesbian body, in all its tenacity, shows up even when it hurts, even when it is unsure of where it lives in time, even when it’s been broken—by others or by ourselves—the body expresses and expands and morphs and shows us the way.

Over the past year, my own body has suffered. My body left home in Virginia, with her partner, to start fresh in New Mexico, a land I had placed on a pedestal as the place where my lover and I would play house, build a farm, grow old and wrinkled: two chubby lesbians on a porch watching their dogs run and hearing the goats bleat in the distance as the sun sets over the Sandias. When I began visualizing the issue, our bodies were shoved, with four dogs and a cat, into a 300 square-foot trailer on her family’s extra plot of land while we let ourselves adjust onto new, hard and dusty ground. As the stories and poems started arriving in my submission queue, we were sweating under the high desert sun, renovating an old house we bought on ten acres, slamming fence posts into the ground, milking our sweet goat, and arguing over paint colors. In December, we had our home. Our bodies were waiting to step into the life. I was reading these beautiful stories of heartbreak and trauma and first loves and rejection. My partner was quietly falling in love with someone else. A month later, to save myself, my body left home again, alone, and my heart reluctantly followed. As I’ve shaped this issue, I’ve been steeped in grief. My body has been in charge of my life for perhaps the first time. She remembers the life I abruptly left in dreams, in visceral responses to memory and smells, in how she sobs without warning. My belly flops, my head is heavy, my appetite leaves and returns, my bed is lonely and my sex drive is a coyote howling for her pack across the high plains at night.

When it was time to put this issue together, lesbian stories saved me. My body was broken and afraid, but in this issue you will find lesbian bodies that carry stories of heartbreak, shame, trauma, identity exploration, fierce love and pleasure, connections with the animal world, and the ovaries-out, full-on-gumption to survive and persist.

These poems and narratives connect bodies and how we live through them; they express how our bodies become both literal expressions of a truly lived life and the ground metaphor for our being. The first essay by Sarah Fonseca explores the beauty of sex between women with the real world of things and ideas in a way that is fresh and exciting, smart and sexy. Donika Kelly’s poetry is saturated in the kind of deep heavy feeling that reminds me I am not alone in this world of love, that we are all just animals with consciousness trying to make sense of our emotional bodies. These pages include different kinds of body trauma, and the way many lesbians navigate shame in their early years for simply having a body, for simply feeling through that body in a world that is terrified of women and the way we seek pleasure, joy, and connection. Sheri Reynolds’ short story about two women in rural Virginia explores love in a way that reminds me of home. Jen Rouse asks in her poems, were we ever/more than a trick of the light? and the answer might lie in the many breakup stories I chose to encircle that giant question. Cathleen Rhodes and Sally Willowbee remind me of the importance of collecting women’s stories, about holding each other up to the light. Sinister Wisdom always has, and always will, for years to come, teach me to praise lesbians more, to encourage and love and stand tall in it all, together. I hope you’ll see these stories doing this work: all of our bodies singing the hurt, the dailiness, the rapture and delight, together.

Tara Shea Burke

October 2017

Two Prongs Through the Same Eyelet: Body Conscious Tools

Sarah Fonseca

It’s her most treasured accessory. Rarely do you witness a competitive lifter who doesn’t have one of these wide strips of leather, four inches wide by 10 millimeters thick, biting down and around the space between her ribcage and pelvis. While it’s tempting to assume that the lifting belt is worn for lumbar support, its purpose is incrementally less noble: the belt is a tool to give the lifter an edge; something for her to press her belly’s stabilizing muscles against. The difference between setting a record and failing a lift is often a matter of nerve, prongs, notches.

United States of America Powerlifting and its parent organization, the International Powerlifting Federation, forbid the use of most supplements, both cloth and chemical, in their ‘raw’ divisions: no knee wraps, no testosterone, no squat suits, no caffeine. Yet, both governing bodies remain universally accepting of the belt. If a body is strapping enough to fully lower, raise, and lock out a barbell, the lift counts. There is no need to interrogate whether or not lifting while belted renders a competitor a cheater, a fraud.

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The strap-on harness is generally worn by a woman to penetrate her lover with a phallus made of silicone or a similarly amenable (yet sturdy) material. In exchange for stability, pliable leather and nickel-plated buckles embrace the waist. Curiously, this pleasure remains far more controversial than the sanctioned pain––the bruising, the scraping, the vomiting, the fever, the torn ACL, the ruptured pectoral––of powerlifting. No strength athlete contests the legitimacy of the powerlifting belt with the intensity that the strap-on dildo is debated within its own sport: consensual fucking.

The exhaustive flow of opinions surrounding the ethics of this particular carnal act is enough to render one’s body incapable of producing its own flow of arousal ever again. I think strap-ons are a product of compulsory heterosexuality, writes an author of Ask A Rad Fem, a blog for women who, in the 2010s, ascribe to a strand of sex-critical feminism initiated in the 1970s. I have never used them in my relationships with women, she notes. There is constantly pressure to apply heteronormative roles to lesbian relationships, and I think wearing a fake penis to mimic heterosexual sex is one of those things.

Yet the heteronormative, with all their pressures, seem to grimace and clench with equal intensity at the strap-on’s existence and function. In a question titled If Lesbians like sex with other women, why do they simulate sex with a man?, a Yahoo! Answers user inquires, Why do Lesbians wear a strap-on-dick which simultes [sic] sex with a man, if they like having sex with other women? seems to me that if they’re not going to do woman to woman, the lesbian would be better off with the real thing instead of a fake one strapped on.

During such opining, gnostic feminism colludes with patriarchal inferiority to stifle and betray feminine lust; the very thing that all schools of feminist thought should be tasked with safeguarding.

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Hawking everything from belts to singlets and squat shoes to chalk, Astoria, Oregon’s liftinglarge.com is one of the largest distributors of strength sport equipment in the world. While Lifting Large sells its own line of merchandise, the company also offers products crafted by other esteemed powerlifting companies, including Inzer Advanced Designs, Schiek, and Titan Support Systems––the latter, undoubtedly named after Greek mythology’s lineage. Titan’s divine entities were both feminine and masculine, and both genders were revered for their incredible feats of strength.

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In 1975, Paul Simon annotated 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Forty years later, Melissa Tofton dreams up 50 ways to pin one’s lover down. A Brit based in Berlin, she spends her days bent over a workbench, crafting delicate leather treats. Ethically sourced hides experience a second life as intricately braided handcuffs, o-ring chokers, garter belts, and the finest of strap-on harnesses. All bespoke and available in blacks, whites, nudes, and crimsons, her pieces range in cost from $50 to $544.

In lean block letters on the ‘about’ page of her website, it is noted:

MELISSA AIMS TO CREATE SENSUAL, BODY CONSCIOUS TOOLS OF EXPRESSION.

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In Lifting Large’s style of e-commerce, no assumptions are made. The pink belt costs $48.99. A black belt, or a pink belt, or a navy blue belt all cost $48.99. There is no tax for fancying the color that came to represent the pinnacle of femininity after World War II. Lifting belts aren’t marketed like razors or even other athletic miscellany like soccer cleats, for which one is monetarily penalized. Additionally, there is no philanthropy behind the pink powerlifting belt, no burgeoning October campaign urging consumers to purchase bubblegum-colored gear that is branded I love boobies in a Cooper Black typeface. Even the description of the belt is radically matter-of-fact:

Economy Pink Powerlifting Belt - Single Prong

Heavy Duty single Prong weightlifting belt

Pinksuede [sic] inside and out. No logo on the back

6 rows of heavy duty stitching

Seamless roller buckle

~4 inches wide x ~10mm thick

XS fits 21-29 inch waist

Small fits 25-33 inch waist

Medium fits 29-37 inch waist

Large fits 32-38 inch waist

XL 35-42 inch waist

IPF Approved

In this world, pink is just a different color of dye, a different way that color bounces off one’s retinas. But powerlifters are not so sport-driven that they are unfamiliar to the ways of gendered goods. One reviewer of a pink belt writes, Bought this belt for my wife as she is getting into powerlifting. Another customer, a woman, remarks, The colour is a real win for me. Of course it’s playful to highlight one’s femininity while participating in an activity that’s continually associated with the masculine. To wear pink is to be a girl, and to lift well while a girl is to throw a wrench in the machine.

That cheekiness, however, can be a symptom of a familiar tragedy: the one where a woman must reconcile her femininity with a passion that’s out of line.

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A new Law of Motion: the nearer women’s bodies are, the greater the indulgence...and the opposition. The only sapphic deed that surpasses strap-on sex in controversy is a variation on tribadism in which bodies remain