hexafu

When you hear men talking,” said Cornelia, “all they ever do is speak ill of women. … And I don’t quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?

— Moderata Fonte (1555 – 1592), The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (1600)

“How bad is it we use each other / to make up stories”

— Kay Gabriel, from “Grist For Other Mills,” Elegy Department Spring: Candy Sonnets

You run away from yourself. Like a

bird far from its shadow.

— Kim Hyesoon, tr. by Don Mee Choi, from Autobiography of Death; “Commute: Day One”

“If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.”

— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

The horror in the merely schematic.

May 6, 1914

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries Of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923

what lingers in my

mind,

what rings so clear is the hot mouth of shame opening

in my gut, awakened by the more I’d wanted: to taste

and at the same time be tasted, to be ridden, to take

inside me whatever you would give. Shame, in both the wanting and the wanting’s return,

swallowing whatever longing I wanted to voice.

— Donika Kelly, from The Renunciations: Poems; “The Last Time”

A November moon

keeps chewing my psyche,

— Velimir Khlebnikov, from Collected Poems & Selected Writings; “Everland,”

“I wanted to break something inside you. Enter some fissure in your soul, that dark room with its dirt floors and melancholic choirs. To fall into the underground cavern of you, forget, awhile, the burnt taste of my own grief, the cracked vessel of my heart.”

— Danusha Laméris, from “Break,” The American Poetry Review (vol. 50, no. 1, January/February 2021)

LESBIAN LORE

Witches are individuals who refuse to submit to the ego. restraints and self-denials necessary for social intercourse.

The more desperate the longing for strict and clear hier-archies, the more threatening are witches.

— Lee Lanning and Vernette Hart, excerpt from The Ripening: An Almanac of Lesbian Lore & Vision, June 1981

“Decipher me, my love, or I will be forced to destroy you.”

— Clarice Lispector, from The Book of Delights; “The Beginning of Spring,”

“I lost myself so many years ago that I hesitate to try to find myself again. I am afraid to begin. Existing so often gives me palpitations. I am so afraid to be myself. I am so dangerous.”

— Clarice Lispector II Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“I’ve never been free in my whole life. Inside I’ve always chased myself. I’ve become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I’m seemingly free, but I’m a prisoner inside of me.”

— Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“yesterday, upon the stair, i met a man who wasn’t there. he wasn’t there again today, oh how i wish he’d go away.”

— William Hughes Mearns, from Antigonish, 1899

“W.H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings.).”

— Lorine Niedecker. Between Your House and Mine.

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

— Anaïs Nin, from “Henry and June: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932”

“I was punished for clinging. I clung. I clutched all those I loved; I clutched at the lovely moments of life; my hands closed upon every full hour. My arms were always tight and craving to embrace: I wanted to embrace and hold the light, the wind, the sun, the night, the whole world. I wanted to caress, to heal, to rock, to lull, to surround, to encompass. And I strained and I held so much that they broke; they broke away from me. Everything eluded me then. I was condemned not to hold.”

— Anaïs Nin, from “House of Incest,” published c. 1936

Unconscious egoism.

[January 16, 1927]

— Anaïs Nin, Journals of Anaïs Nin 1923-1927 vol. 3

“Have you ever killed something good for you just to be certain that you’re the reason you can no longer have it?”

— Larissa Pham, from “Abject Permanence,” published in Unruly Bodies

I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Parliament Hill Fields’

Lady, your room is lousy with flowers. When you kick me out, that’s what I’ll remember.

— Sylvia Plath, excerpt from “Leaving Early” from Crossing the Water

But

isn’t it funny?

That when they ask about black childhood,

all they are interested in is our pain,

as if the joy-parts were accidental.

I write love poems, too,

but

you only want to see my mouth torn open in

protest

— Koleka Putuma, from “Black Joy,” Collective Amnesia