alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
Michelle found this poem, too, something from her own heritage.

Love Poem
Audre Lorde

Speak earth and bless me with what is richest )


Audre Lorde self-described as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," and was the New York State Poet Laureate at her death.

Bless me with what is richest, Lorde wrote. Love is sweet as honey. Lien said, yes.


Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
The next poem Michelle found.

Wind
Janice Gould

What can I say about someone who )


Janice Gould is a Koyangk'auwi Maidu poet and an assistant professor in Women's and Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

What can I say about someone who performs interesting magic, Gould wrote. Someone like you, Michelle said. A force of nature. And Lien smiled.


Source: Doubters and Dreamers, Janice Gould
alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
Lien found the next poem, too.

Just once before I die I want someone to make love to me in Cantonese
Indigo Chih-Lien Som

my mother )


Indigo Chih-Lien Som is an American-born Chinese woman describing herself as "garlic-throwing, book-binding, shuttle-throwing cancer and fire horse".

Just once I want to remember, Som wrote. Just once I want. I want with you, said Lien; do you want with me?

Michelle bought a learn-to-speak-Cantonese set.



Source: The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, edited by Sharon Lim-Hing
alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
Lien found the next poem, after Michelle said she was afraid to introduce Lien to her family.

Loving In The War Years
Cherríe Moraga

Loving you is like living )


Cherríe Moraga describes herself as a 'Xicanadyke'. "I am ever-grateful to feminism for teaching me this," she writes, "that political oppression is always experienced personally by someone."

Love is living dangerously, Moraga wrote. I've got to take you as you come to me. I refuse, said Michelle, to be afraid.


Source: Loving in the War Years, Cherríe L. Moraga
alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
Michelle couldn't let Lien's invitation pass, of course. She tracked down and gave to Lien a poem expressing exactly how she'd felt the moment she met Lien.

distractions
Vanessa Marzan Deza

oh excuse me i'm sorry )

Vanessa Marzan Deza is Pinay—Filipina—and writes, according to her bio, "grounded in her particular context as colored and female. It is a conscious act of resistance and creative envisioning."

Let me look away, Deza wrote. I didn't mean to stare, and there is work to do. But I don't want, Michelle told Lien, to look away.


Source: The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, edited by Sharon Lim-Hing
alexconall: the Pleiades (Default)
[personal profile] alexconall
Once there was a girl; once there was a girl. Women, both, really. Her name was Lien; her name was Michelle. After Lien met Michelle, she copied out this poem and gave it to Michelle.


Fragment 31
Sappho tr. Anne Carson

He seems to me equal to gods that man )


Sappho. The most readily recognized queer female poet in the world. Not, probably, the first—that honor may go to Enheduanna, the first poet whose name we know. But the most recognizable name among queer female poets, and Sappho 31 may be her best-known poem.

All is to be dared, Sappho wrote. So Lien dared. But the rest of the poem, unless the last stanza of Catullus 51 is an accurate translation (unlikely), is lost.


Source: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson

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