All the girlfriends you ever went withare together now, and they’re allgetting along. They’re lovers of each other,and you’re in the middle playing the lyrewith Greek attire in the middle of a Maxfield Parrishforest. Doe-eyed nymphs fondling panpipeswhile the pure note sounds. Purple mountainsrise over aeolian forests, and the windis the pianist for a women’s chorus,and the longest-fingered of all the womenplays the lute. Pluck the chord,pour the wine. The flute chambersEgypts of desire. And the glimmer bubble gurglesof a brook where each stone is smoothedto the consistency of knees and thighs,and the sun, a gigantic pearl, livens them.Lesbian heaven is filled with dogs and cats.All the pets we’ve ever hadare tendered by the hands that kept them,and they all behave—a beloved companyamong pillars’ uplift and glitter.Where Diana sets down her hunting implementsand all the lesbians in heaven clamourto her limbs with tambour touch,the afternoon unfolds its leaf,the night cadenzas its embrace,the stars become the beaded necklace of morningwith the moon as centerpiece.And the gold of the painting shinethon me and thee.
Lesbian Heaven
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“Lesbian Heaven” from FIRE-RIMMED EDEN: SELECTED POEMS: by Lynn Lonidier.
Published by Sinister Wisdom on July 06, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Lynn Lonidier.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Used with permission from the Estate of Lynn Lonidier
Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems gathers poems from Lynn Lonidier’s rich and varied collections. Her poetry links multiple poetic constellations of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrating linguistic innovations and radical reconfigurations sexuality and gender.
“In editing and introducing FIRE-RIMMED EDEN, a representative swath of the life work in poetry of Lynn Lonidier, Julie Enszer has brilliantly maneuvered to reveal a much-needed, long-awaited Lesbian epic, an always already ancient, dream-inducing monument built of language upon Lonidier’s own not yet released Lesbian bones, to stand precisely in the gaping silence of the 2,400 long years between Sappho and Wollstonecraft. This monument is capacious; contains missed markings of Lesbian story, event, labor, catastrophe, sex (cunt hairs caught in teeth), political fights, romantic tragedies, betrayals, banalities, language invention, cataclysm, dirge, word births, gender inversions, iconography, advances and reversals, revenge, correction, dream, accident, obsession, abandonments, pleasures, play, fails, stupidities, songs (and love songs), genius, drunkenness and LOVE. This collection is gasp-inducing, mind-blowing, vast, miraculous, funny and free. A rare, revelatory, gorgeously heartbreaking read.”
—Rachel Levitsky
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