Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology (15 page)

“If I hadn’t learned to write about sex, and particularly to write about my own sexual desires, I don’t think I would have survived. I think the guilt, the terror I grew up with was so extraordinarily powerful that if I had not written my way out of it, I’d be dead … And I think it’s vital [to write about], aside from whether it ever becomes good fiction, particularly for women with transgressive sexuality … [or] people who in any way feel their sexuality cannot be expressed. Writing can be a way to find a way to be real and sane in the world, even if it feels a little crazy while you’re doing it. If we are to answer that call, we have to be able to feel every part of our lives.”

-
Dorothy
Allison

seeley quest

Bio

seeley quest was born in 1976, won a first poetry award in 1989, has lived in California and the East Bay since 1998, and performed around the Bay Area since 2001. Sie has featured at the International Queerness and Disability Conference, National Queer Arts Festival, SF Anarchist Cafe, SF Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival, and more, as well as on tour to Vancouver, Toronto, and numerous other US cities and colleges. More of hir work’s at
sinsinvalid.org
.

Mini-Interview

How did you start writing about sex
?
i had written a few shorter love poems in the late ‘90’s which had hints of suggestive phrases, as i became interested in playing a bit with readers around what i was evoking. An affair in ‘98 with my second lover helped increase comfort with my sexuality at that time, which had been quite repressed while growing up, and pretty unsatisfied until my 20’s. In ‘99 i also began reading the
East
Bay
Express
, where Carol Queen then published a sex advice column weekly (far better than Dan Savage’s or anyone else’s i’ve seen), and in ‘00 i met her going to an educational workshop at Good Vibrations she was teaching …  … this was part of my first exposure to actually sex-positive public communication, and a local culture of discourse valuing directly engaging with sexuality. i went back to school in 2000 to finish a BA in Performance Studies and Gender Studies, and wrote my first erotically- invested vignette in late 2000,which was about power play, shaving someone’s face. That fall i was in a class for Gender Studies at New College of California taught by Judy Grahn called “Literature of the Sexual Underground,” and texts i recall included some of her writing, and also Robert Gluck’s. His book
Margery
Kempe
narrated merging his experience with a female saint’s, and he and Judy explicitly describe and reflect on their sexualities. The opportunity to talk with both of them about their writing approaches—as well as see performance art then such as at 848 Divisadero, Keith Hennessy improvising pissing while dancing—influenced my own experimenting and interest to write material specifically invoking erotic energy.

he
has short arms

seeley quest

you know, the kind you get if your parent was exposed to certain drugs

or other factors that mutate development.

He has short arms, but regularly wields his razor to keep a close shave,

because it seems easier to introduce himself with a European kiss on the cheek

than handshake.

I can tell he likes his jawline to stay as kempt and smooth as possible, ‘cause

he’s got a lot of people to meet and kiss and charm.

He’s also game to charm by feeding people chocolate, being fed chocolate, and by

licking chocolate off of others, too.

He shares this after a girl says I just fed her from my piece of chocolate torte.

He adds yes, he wants some also, and then I get his mouth

deliberately closed around my two fingers to caress the bite from them

with his tongue, an approach I hardly get every day.

He thanks me and moves off in the crowd, while I marvel at how supple his

lips feel.

He has short arms, and perhaps his legs wouldn’t seem so long otherwise,

but with his height and peculiar grace there’s a beautiful long movement as he

suddenly steps
down
next to me upon returning and saying yes, he’d like more

but thinks he needs to be kneeling for it.

I can tell he’s not
all
about chiseled bravado when this time he lets me play with

him at my pace, lets me fingers brush against the surprising softness of the skin

around the lower edges of his face, asking, “how badly do you want it?”

before fingers pushing the smear past his teeth.

He worships the texture of my fingertips as much as the torte, savors sucking them

even more thoroughly now, and after he rises and disappears again,

I wonder if he likes his fingers licked as much as I do;

are his upper appendages sensitive different from his lower ones?

They
are
placed perfectly to stroke his own chest or another’s; he barely has to

stretch one arm to mouth his fingertip wet and then circle that pleasure

upon his nipple.

Economy of size yields economy of movement–I
like
the languidness of his hands

reaching above his shoulders, and returning to tickle at rib level,

where they belong.

He has short arms, which fingers just right, when I imagine him folding at the

waist and knees to place his head at my legs’ juncture.

I can tell how sweetly his hands frame his face, how suited they are to press apart

thighs, how neither of us would be distracted by an excess of gangly limbs

from the focus of his elbows angled precisely in to pull hidden skin taut

for discovery.

He has short arms, so he’s trained his full lips to do some things in their stead,

like grasp the cap of a thing that needs a screwing motion to open it up;

he need apply no wrist when he can just circle it with his mouth’s hold until it

comes completely undone.

He is also accomplished with his feet; he uses one to wash his ass.

Upon learning this, first I think, “What
else
can he do with his feet??”

Next I think, “What
else
does he do with his ass??”

I think of when he fingers knelt to me, how I said, “You
know
I’m also a pro-dom,”

and how instead of, “Why am I not surprised,” what if he said, “You think I’m

surprised?” And then I could’ve shown restraint by simply saying, “Cheeky,”

while lightly scratching my nails across the side of his face before letting him

suck them inside.

I can tell if I managed to draw him off from the crowd to dally somewhere less

public, when he leaned by a wall I could pin his arms at the shoulders to

hold him there; though he quite outsizes me what if he accepted it,

my pressing in to have my way where I want?

He has short arms, which remind me of my one high schoolmate with

not much dangling for his, the one who was my English teacher’s son and

therefore felt off but who was beautiful and the most streamlined

runner on the track team, someone I saw cutting through air for hours.

Queer lovers of mine with straight spines have said they love my back’s

asymmetry, its sinuous twisting, and I can tell he
knows
how it feels

to be a freak in one’s bones, the way others don’t.

So little is off-limits now; I hardly want to wash my fingers that held his chocolate,

knowing that later I’ll roam more of my body with them.

I can tell he knows it, too, as upon parting for the night, hugging me close

with short arms, his last murmured words are, “When you get off think of me.”

serpent stirred

seeley quest

You brought the
snarl
out of me,
beyond
the curling lip and teeth wanting to snap,

beyond the growl rumbling from my throat echoing the ones you left in my ear.

You brought out my hungriness for as
much
as you could give–

incisors clasping upon collarbone, smacked, grabbed, held in place, made

to toss this way and that, gang-banged–you awoke how insatiable I could be.

Even to share meals and feeling the pleasure of feeding you, then to

find on my finger the spoor your body made later–to touch what entered and

exited and

stain myself with your smell lingering after I washed–it fueled me,

the earthiness of you.

This mouth opened as I pedaled on adrenaline across town; I sang big with

yipee-
yiy
-yo-cai-yays, wanted to shriek and groan
so
much when with you

that it ripped my voice to shreds–I was inspired to let myself
bellow
in my

most shameless beastliness;

just wanted to hear you get on your pillow or bike and bellow, too.

‘Cause I saw we’re
those
kinds of cancers, guarded if need be but ready to

give up some amazing goods once that surface’s penetrated. I have
that

kind of moon

in scorpio, all about sex and death and delving into such states of extremity,

learning from life at the edge. You know what they
say
about cancers,

how we’re just scorpios with housecoats on, just a little more into domestic

discipline. And you knew I was born in the year of the dragon, able to go all

subterranean and deep and dark, then sky-high style, and back again.

These arms
burned
, still I rode, these haunches held over to grind into you

burned
, still I rode, days later it made accomplishing much anything

agonizingly slow,
still
I rode; that desire, to write while at work and call you to

read while you were working, too, and to steal off with toys to
fuck
myself until I

could take a break from that wave of pure lust and eat and give in to my fatigue–

that sneaking to jack off I almost
never
do, that dreaming your bowie against my

body I’d never done before; I rode into and through more burn

and still didn’t know when my craving would abate.

Scorpion paused, flexed along its segments down to its tail, feeling the stinger

staying in balance no matt what shifted while covering the ground, ready to

strike if sufficiently aroused. Crab sidled up to another crab, admired

its strong shell, kept pincers prepared to defend kin’s delicious soft parts from

attack danced on agile legs.

Kundalini serpent stirred from where it had lain in dormant waiting,

and started to rise up this crooked spine.

After you left, something at my groin gave way;

my age or my sounds and furies or how I keep pushing through

finally fissured tissue in a
new
way that needed correcting,

and before I knew what was happening, I couldn’t call you from the hospital.

Then it was day after day in bed, recalling my desire against the washing machine,

on the kitchen counter, in bathrooms residential or public.

Week after week of wondering when I’ll be able to take

the new scar at the bottom of my belly being pressed,

when where you once bit so sensationally at the top of my thigh won’t be numb.

After you left, a day came that pulled me to find what I could take,

what I could off with all the ache and endurance in me.

f t f t, I found the power of holding
myself
in place,

teasing myself up, while holding stillness and openness,

not tensing my gut or clenching as if for your cock–

keeping from bucking as I came made me yell
louder
:

feeling inside rushing up, bigger and bigger, and I rode it

without getting burned at all.

After you left, I got my own knife–I don’t need to imagine yours anymore;

this serpent knows what dreams are for deferring and when the time’s come

to rise and ride.

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