TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism
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    • Radical Expression(s)
    • Radical: A Tribute to Barbara Mor
    • Radical Lesbian Feminism in Practice
    • Abe Louise Young: A Suite of Poems
    • Capacity
    • Plastic Swimming Caps
    • Eris: The Radical Feminine Awakens
    • Ascension of St. Thomas: The Sensual Immortals
    • My Women Have Spoken
    • Some Women
    • Hunting Woman
    • Unplugging Your Inner Patriarchy
    • She Who Carries the Seeds
    • Allison Merriweather: A Suite of Images
    • Localized Deafness: A Suite of Poems
    • Naked in the Woods
    • An Interview with Carol Anne Douglas
    • Imagining Differently: Revisiting Radical Feminism
    • Feminism
    • Who the Hell Is Rosie Méndez?
    • First Responder Who Only Fainted During Training Videos
    • Index of Jobs for Women
    • Screwnomics
    • Menstruation
    • Merkin Art: A Suite of Pussies
    • "A Witch, A Cat Woman": Cat Woman's Patriarchal Roots
    • Feminism in the Work of Michele Pred
    • Lucky Girl
    • The Social, Cultural, and Political Necessity of Anne Sexton
    • An Interview with Sharon Doubiago
    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
    • Entertainment for Men
    • Greve Series / White Works
    • A Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow White
    • Laws of Kissing If Newton Were a Woman
    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
    • Inspiration
  • Previous Issues
    • Voices of Feminism >
      • Issue 16: "Feminisms" >
        • Toward a Theory and Praxis of Sustainable Feminism
        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
        • Grace
        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
        • Braids
        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
        • We had rituals we didn't know what for
        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
        • Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
        • Lack of Cover
        • Refresh
        • Crabby Apples
        • A Place of Storytelling and Sustenance: Molly Sutton Kiefer's Nestuary
        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
        • A Song for Maman Dantor
        • Listen
        • Abiquiu
        • Changing
        • Barbie at Rest
        • When We Crack, Let's Do It Together
        • Duel
        • Domestic Constellation
        • America the Beautiful
        • Death of a Valkyrie
        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
        • Landlady Emily Carr
        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
        • Murder
        • White Sunset Through a Mesquite Tree
        • Patricia Cornflake's Lesbian Lifestyle
        • Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics
        • A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken
        • Memory's Witness
        • Finding Edges
        • Oh, That Bed! That Bed!
        • Mother, Daughter
        • Here We Are
        • Crazy Jane Addams Occupies Hull's House
        • Virtue
        • The Canary
        • White Sunset #3
        • Flow
        • Citrus
        • The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
        • Occupy Wall Street Poster
        • The Tent
        • Occupy Me!
        • (post)Occupation
        • The Poison Our Grandmothers and Mothers Drank
        • Hellish Clout
        • Tangle
        • The Bathing Scene from Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"
        • As I Lie
        • The Therapist
      • Issue 13: "Death" >
        • A Feminist Editorial on Death
        • Plucked
        • Chromosomal Geography
        • The Clinic
        • Offal
        • I Have Come to Show You Death
        • The Making of a Peaceful Death
        • Sayonara
        • Sitting in the Lap of God
        • Cycle
        • My Assailant
        • New Jersey Spring
        • Something Missing
        • Triptych: Art Essay on Death
        • The Heroes of Ecbatana
        • Jane is Dead
        • The Miscarriage
        • A Spiritual Death? The One-Eyed Doe...
        • Black Bears
        • Circus
        • The Road to Nowhere
        • American Jisei
        • Nothing to Lose
        • For Linda
        • For Ryan
        • Mindfall
        • Rest in Peace
        • Love Is Stronger Than Death
        • Twins and M/Others: A Survival Story
        • Due Diligence (A.K.A. Cracking Open Her Case)
        • Empirical Evidence
        • Dissociation
        • 27.2727273 Readers
        • The Nomad
        • Manifesto
        • Baby Island
        • Chinatown, Death, and Women
        • Surrounded by Death
        • Where Sanity Returned
        • Whitney
        • In the Shadow of Mumtaz
        • Of Woods
        • The Egg Broke
        • Playing with Dolls
        • Threadbare
        • Because We Must Lose You
        • Clock Time
        • Gynosis One: Samhain
        • The Last Trimester
        • Crossing
        • Tiny Eve
      • Issue 12: "Southwestern Voices" >
        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
        • Trojan Horses in the Desert
        • You Can See the Silence
        • Fleeing Oklahoma
        • North Rim, Grand Canyon, AZ
        • Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills, CA
        • Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, CA
        • Our Lady
        • Mothers of Beauty
        • Talking Incest
        • Desire
        • Tales from the Health Club
        • Three Years Old Watching the Open Sky
        • The Missing Girls
        • It Has Become Our Will: Onward with Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
        • A Conversation with bell hooks
        • Gertrude Stein, Hitler, and Vichy-France
        • Tinker Tailor Soldier Stein
        • Organic Evolution
        • Eclipse of Hope
        • I Lied
        • First Apartment
        • Translations of Poems by Shez
        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
        • Invisible Outline
        • We Live as Two Lesbians
        • PrognostiKate
        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
        • Matrices
        • Coming Into Word
        • Prince of Paris
        • Ending Patriarchy
        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
        • Always a Lesbian
        • Anti- Rape
        • Walking the Moon
        • Entanglement
        • Women Alone
        • No One Lives Her Life
        • Coming Out of the Straightjacket
        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
        • Jill Johnston
      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
        • Before and after Sappho: Logos
        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
        • My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory
        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
        • Reinvention and the Everyday
        • The Personal is Political
        • Notes on Reinvention and Extinction
        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
        • Gay Trans and the Queering in Between
        • Lesbian Lament
        • The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon
        • Who Says We're Extinct?
        • She Who
        • Lesbians Going All The Way
        • Trivia Saves Lives
        • Notes on Contributors
      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
        • Vulture Medicine Augury
        • When hens were flying and god was not yet born
        • Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminine in Taino Spirituality
        • Testify
        • Young Pagan Goddess
        • Goddess is Metaformmic
        • For Want of a Goddess
        • Amaterasu- The Great Eastern Sun Goddess of Peace
        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
        • Inanna Comes to Me in a Dream
        • First Blood Well The History of Bleeding
        • The Song of Lilith
        • Freedom Speaks Through Us
        • Dulce's Hands
        • Notes on contributors (9)
      • Issue 7/8: Unabashed Knowing >
        • Bad Manners All That Jazz
        • Hypatia
        • Amerika in 5 Parts
        • Screens: The War at Home
        • Invisible Nature
        • Woman-Woman Bonds in Prehistory
        • I Saw a Woman Dance
        • The Edible Parts
        • The Happy Hooker Revisisted
        • Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation:the Mother/Virgin Split
        • Notes on contributors (7/8)
      • Issue 6: The Art of the Possible >
        • The Aerial Lesbian Body: The Politics of Physical Expression
        • Wanting a Gun
        • Red Poppies Among the Ruings
        • Returning Home with Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia
        • Noah's Wife
        • Reclaiming the Spooky: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly as Radical Pioneers of the Esoteric
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        • Notes on Contributors (6)
      • Issue 5: The Resurrection Issue (2/2007) >
        • Waiting for Sappho
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        • The Loudest Self
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      • Issue 4: The Wonderful & The Terrible (9/2006) >
        • Cunctipotence
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        • Degendering Sex: Undoing Erotic Alienation
        • Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire (What's Truth Got to Do With It?)
        • That Easter
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      • Issue 3: Love & Lust (2/2006) >
        • Conversation with Michele Causse
        • Chloto 1978
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        • She is Still Burning
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        • When Sex is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy
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        • Notes on Contributors (1)
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She Who. . . from In Search of Pure Lust

Lise Weil
When She Who speaks the earth will turn over
Judy Grahn


It's a week since we parted. I take myself to see "Wings of Desire." There's a scene in the bar when they finally find each other: the man-angel and the woman trapeze artist. He offers her his glass of wine. And the camera frames her face, her red lips that begin to speak at last. I notice the perfection of those lips, the smoothness of the skin just above them, beneath her nose. I notice because at the dentist on Monday the hygienist handed me the mirror to check out a place my toothbrush was missing and instead of that I saw the hair on my upper lip. It looked shaggy and dark. I told myself it was those dentist lights. But all week I've obsessed over it.

And I notice those lips because of Clara. How perfect hers were. How she kept them rouged and perky. How mine must have looked to her, I think now, with all that hair. Yes it might have been something that simple that superficial. Maybe she really longed to feel attracted to a woman, to me, and was stopped by something as trite as dark hairs on the upper lip.


And you? What was it you felt on those coastal evenings each night a different town, sitting down to white wine and calmari and cigarettes? Be honest, now, you. Each night dressing up for her—you'd brought your best clothes—a kind of a thrill. Each night hoping to see in her eyes that she is happy to see you, that you are beautiful to her. Sexy even? Especially on the last nights when you have a nice tan from your hours on the beach. Mornings were difficult, yes, every morning waking up to dull ache. But the evenings. . .oh if it was pain then it was pain mingled with something like ecstasy, to be always on the edge of the unbearable, always on the edge of possibility.

The tantalizing possibility that one of those women might actually look your way.

She Who has never been with a woman before, who is not in your world. She Who says she wants in. She Who is perfect in her beauty like the women who came to your father's library. She Who is shy and trembling and needs and wants to be coaxed and brings out your love of coaxing. She Who brings out the prince charming the feminist savior.

She Who decides very suddenly she is not a lesbian this has all been a fantasy. She Who has lured you thousands of miles away to a hotel in Yugoslavia where you've explained to the embarrassed hotel clerk that the two of you want only one bed. She Who refuses to be touched. She Who—the clerk has given you twin beds which you've moved together—moves the beds apart. She Who inspires every one of your old fears about yourself. You don't have the right clothes or makeup maybe there are hairs on your upper lip of which you're not aware. She Who just by the way she dips into her leather suitcase, plunges her hand into the silken mass, the skirts the slips the scarves tells you she is not your kind and you will forever be subordinated to hers, subject to her whims, at her mercy. . .


It's occured to me that what we can least forgive others for is bringing out our worst selves: exposing the gap between who at any given moment we most wish to be and who we most undeniably are. Grace's Southern hospitality her empathy her graciousness—how they shrivelled up in our last months together, turned to rigid, hateful, mean-spirited. Helen's expansive vision her capacious leonine love replaced by a clinging desperate finally vengeful self. And Clara—who had put her hand on my hand in that cave in Ireland, who had thanked the goddess for allowing her to know this love, Clara of the few words, simple but deep—how she must have hated me for having brought out what she hated most in herself: the cramped, critical, bourgeois snob. Yet apparently, I could forgive Clara for reducing me to one who looked doubtfully at her white reebocks and her cheap Timex watch. For seeing me through the harsh glare of dental lights.

It's the ones who loved me I couldn't forgive. The women whom I failed in love, for whom my love failed, which is to say faltered, sputtered, gave out—and was there ever a woman who let me close for whom my love did not falter? The women who forced me to confront the gap between what I professed with my whole being to want, what my whole life was dedicated to—loving women—and who I was: someone who couldn't. Not at least with any singularity of focus. Not with any consistency. Not in such a way as to inspire faith, or trust.

She Who brought it to a head (in me) and whom I could never forgive for forcing my hand so completely. She the other redhead. The one from the Midwest. The expert in cutting remarks.

We sent each long letters with clippings. Press releases for idiotic books, phrases from political correct feminist papers "the words 'art, vision, dance' are in no way meant to imply that these are universally possible.'" Our acid perceptions sparing no one. "You forgot to underline potluck dinner. So hilarious."

Throwback to my childhood. Del my familiar.

Her self-deprecation, with its tendency to spill out on me. "I think every woman I love is doing just fine. But I think I am wasting my life. Why is this? Don't answer. You're just the one to say 'yes—you are.'"

She ma semblable ma soeur. She who wore the hooded cape in my dream and looked slightly nerdish. Lounging around like me in sweatshirt and pants. "I hope you won't be permanently disabled." Sacrificing compassion to humour. More like me than any woman I've been with.

My long-lost friend.

She whom I sat beside in tortured silence with the frozen lake below waiting for a sign to appear. Waiting in my heart, for some pulse of feeling something that could be translated by my tongue. Touch to my tongue. ("Do you like to have sex with me?" in thin worried voice.) The words of the lesbian poets who loved so juicily so fervently returning to taunt me reproach me for my stinginess my dried-up heart. Dumped by the wings of desire and left for dead.

She has become the one who makes of me someone who when she reaches inside finds nothing there. Who can't feel. Who when she reads a passage from Duras' The Malady of Death has to admit she identifies. It applies to me. And in an unfunny funny moment she writes the words on my forehead "dead man." I am what I have always hated I am become one of those men I resented for being so undeserving of what they had been given—her love. For not being able to return it in kind. Undeserving recipient of the greatest gift known to mankind.

I reach in it's not there I reach in over and over, keep checking, I think sometimes I feel something flickering in there trying to kindle, to rub itself back to life. It can't be out for good! It's just dormant, needs a little help to spark again. . .

But only months ago, November, those moments of frisky, girlish joy. Hilarity. My heart swelling with every phone call. Unreasonably happy despite the world's woes. Watching the returns at her place, George Bush and Dan Quayle, a nightmare descending. The very next day we walk up the gorge together—rotting leaves and branches, sharp white line of froth—then stand in the huge vaulted space, gaze up at the water drilling down from that high mouth. And skip back down the trail, all gloom dispelled.

It must be the way she's changed, yes, the way she cowers now seems afraid of me the way I feel her pulling at me, just don't pull at me okay? I can't feel when you do that, just go on doing your own thing, just leave me alone.

But who is this she who cowers and winces? Who is this I who doesn't love? And which is me? The one who flies into the fire until she crashes and burns, or the one who stays in, who fends off, who freezes. The one who feels too much or the one who doesn't feel at all? Either way it's She Who who decides. She Who always decides.

Working Notes

This is a chapter from a memoir-in-progress, In Search of Pure Lust, that, among other things, attempts to answer the question: "whatever happened to those wild on-the-edge lesbian seekers who were hellbent on reinventing the world?" Having been one of those seekers, I know how to answer the question only in the most personal terms. What happened to me, and what in so many cases ended "us," was the very thing that originally propelled us, that made us huge with vision and possibility. Lesbian desire had been the greatest force for creation, for expansion, for love, I had ever known. Yet, as I came to realize, in its baser forms—and it inevitably devolved into these—it became a force for constriction, and often for destruction. Time and again, I saw friendships, even communities, brought down by it.

This much I learned in the course of my love adventures. Desire was a wild card, wayward and unpredictable. It reared its head when I was feeling wary, estranged—even, abused. It flagged when I was fondest and most trusting. And more often than not, I couldn't help noticing, it fed on, and fed into, childhood wounds. While at first it might have catapulted me far far from my origins, my family history, over time it had a way of thrusting me right back into them—if not of rubbing my face in them. In short, as many of us came to discover in the course of those years, Lust was often not very Pure at all.

For myself, after one brutal ending too many, I began to sit zazen and, over a period of many years, learned how to sit with desire, not to be tossed around by it. The memoir chronicles this shift and the changes it brought to my life over time, how I learned—though not without alarming relapses—to practice sustainable friendship, and love.

About the Author

Picture
Lise Weil teaches in Goddard College's Individualized MA program and lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she is currently grieving the loss early this year of two of our finest local singer/songwriters: Llasa de Sela and Kate McGarrigle. Beyond Recall, a collection of the last writings of local painter and writer Mary Meigs, which she compiled and edited, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2006.


For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page. 

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.
There are new mountains." (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986)
  • Home
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    • Conversations with a Bee, a Lily, and a Bear
    • Morning Song
    • Radical Expression(s)
    • Radical: A Tribute to Barbara Mor
    • Radical Lesbian Feminism in Practice
    • Abe Louise Young: A Suite of Poems
    • Capacity
    • Plastic Swimming Caps
    • Eris: The Radical Feminine Awakens
    • Ascension of St. Thomas: The Sensual Immortals
    • My Women Have Spoken
    • Some Women
    • Hunting Woman
    • Unplugging Your Inner Patriarchy
    • She Who Carries the Seeds
    • Allison Merriweather: A Suite of Images
    • Localized Deafness: A Suite of Poems
    • Naked in the Woods
    • An Interview with Carol Anne Douglas
    • Imagining Differently: Revisiting Radical Feminism
    • Feminism
    • Who the Hell Is Rosie Méndez?
    • First Responder Who Only Fainted During Training Videos
    • Index of Jobs for Women
    • Screwnomics
    • Menstruation
    • Merkin Art: A Suite of Pussies
    • "A Witch, A Cat Woman": Cat Woman's Patriarchal Roots
    • Feminism in the Work of Michele Pred
    • Lucky Girl
    • The Social, Cultural, and Political Necessity of Anne Sexton
    • An Interview with Sharon Doubiago
    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
    • Entertainment for Men
    • Greve Series / White Works
    • A Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow White
    • Laws of Kissing If Newton Were a Woman
    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
    • Inspiration
  • Previous Issues
    • Voices of Feminism >
      • Issue 16: "Feminisms" >
        • Toward a Theory and Praxis of Sustainable Feminism
        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
        • Grace
        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
        • Braids
        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
        • We had rituals we didn't know what for
        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
        • Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
        • Lack of Cover
        • Refresh
        • Crabby Apples
        • A Place of Storytelling and Sustenance: Molly Sutton Kiefer's Nestuary
        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
        • A Song for Maman Dantor
        • Listen
        • Abiquiu
        • Changing
        • Barbie at Rest
        • When We Crack, Let's Do It Together
        • Duel
        • Domestic Constellation
        • America the Beautiful
        • Death of a Valkyrie
        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
        • Landlady Emily Carr
        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
        • Murder
        • White Sunset Through a Mesquite Tree
        • Patricia Cornflake's Lesbian Lifestyle
        • Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics
        • A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken
        • Memory's Witness
        • Finding Edges
        • Oh, That Bed! That Bed!
        • Mother, Daughter
        • Here We Are
        • Crazy Jane Addams Occupies Hull's House
        • Virtue
        • The Canary
        • White Sunset #3
        • Flow
        • Citrus
        • The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
        • Occupy Wall Street Poster
        • The Tent
        • Occupy Me!
        • (post)Occupation
        • The Poison Our Grandmothers and Mothers Drank
        • Hellish Clout
        • Tangle
        • The Bathing Scene from Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"
        • As I Lie
        • The Therapist
      • Issue 13: "Death" >
        • A Feminist Editorial on Death
        • Plucked
        • Chromosomal Geography
        • The Clinic
        • Offal
        • I Have Come to Show You Death
        • The Making of a Peaceful Death
        • Sayonara
        • Sitting in the Lap of God
        • Cycle
        • My Assailant
        • New Jersey Spring
        • Something Missing
        • Triptych: Art Essay on Death
        • The Heroes of Ecbatana
        • Jane is Dead
        • The Miscarriage
        • A Spiritual Death? The One-Eyed Doe...
        • Black Bears
        • Circus
        • The Road to Nowhere
        • American Jisei
        • Nothing to Lose
        • For Linda
        • For Ryan
        • Mindfall
        • Rest in Peace
        • Love Is Stronger Than Death
        • Twins and M/Others: A Survival Story
        • Due Diligence (A.K.A. Cracking Open Her Case)
        • Empirical Evidence
        • Dissociation
        • 27.2727273 Readers
        • The Nomad
        • Manifesto
        • Baby Island
        • Chinatown, Death, and Women
        • Surrounded by Death
        • Where Sanity Returned
        • Whitney
        • In the Shadow of Mumtaz
        • Of Woods
        • The Egg Broke
        • Playing with Dolls
        • Threadbare
        • Because We Must Lose You
        • Clock Time
        • Gynosis One: Samhain
        • The Last Trimester
        • Crossing
        • Tiny Eve
      • Issue 12: "Southwestern Voices" >
        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
        • Trojan Horses in the Desert
        • You Can See the Silence
        • Fleeing Oklahoma
        • North Rim, Grand Canyon, AZ
        • Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills, CA
        • Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, CA
        • Our Lady
        • Mothers of Beauty
        • Talking Incest
        • Desire
        • Tales from the Health Club
        • Three Years Old Watching the Open Sky
        • The Missing Girls
        • It Has Become Our Will: Onward with Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
        • A Conversation with bell hooks
        • Gertrude Stein, Hitler, and Vichy-France
        • Tinker Tailor Soldier Stein
        • Organic Evolution
        • Eclipse of Hope
        • I Lied
        • First Apartment
        • Translations of Poems by Shez
        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
        • Invisible Outline
        • We Live as Two Lesbians
        • PrognostiKate
        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
        • Matrices
        • Coming Into Word
        • Prince of Paris
        • Ending Patriarchy
        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
        • Always a Lesbian
        • Anti- Rape
        • Walking the Moon
        • Entanglement
        • Women Alone
        • No One Lives Her Life
        • Coming Out of the Straightjacket
        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
        • Jill Johnston
      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
        • Before and after Sappho: Logos
        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
        • My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory
        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
        • Reinvention and the Everyday
        • The Personal is Political
        • Notes on Reinvention and Extinction
        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
        • Gay Trans and the Queering in Between
        • Lesbian Lament
        • The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon
        • Who Says We're Extinct?
        • She Who
        • Lesbians Going All The Way
        • Trivia Saves Lives
        • Notes on Contributors
      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
        • Vulture Medicine Augury
        • When hens were flying and god was not yet born
        • Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminine in Taino Spirituality
        • Testify
        • Young Pagan Goddess
        • Goddess is Metaformmic
        • For Want of a Goddess
        • Amaterasu- The Great Eastern Sun Goddess of Peace
        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
        • Inanna Comes to Me in a Dream
        • First Blood Well The History of Bleeding
        • The Song of Lilith
        • Freedom Speaks Through Us
        • Dulce's Hands
        • Notes on contributors (9)
      • Issue 7/8: Unabashed Knowing >
        • Bad Manners All That Jazz
        • Hypatia
        • Amerika in 5 Parts
        • Screens: The War at Home
        • Invisible Nature
        • Woman-Woman Bonds in Prehistory
        • I Saw a Woman Dance
        • The Edible Parts
        • The Happy Hooker Revisisted
        • Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation:the Mother/Virgin Split
        • Notes on contributors (7/8)
      • Issue 6: The Art of the Possible >
        • The Aerial Lesbian Body: The Politics of Physical Expression
        • Wanting a Gun
        • Red Poppies Among the Ruings
        • Returning Home with Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia
        • Noah's Wife
        • Reclaiming the Spooky: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly as Radical Pioneers of the Esoteric
        • Grand Right and Left
        • Notes on Contributors (6)
      • Issue 5: The Resurrection Issue (2/2007) >
        • Waiting for Sappho
        • A Song of Captain Joan
        • Blue Mojo
        • Why Do Something If it Can be Done
        • In Memoriam: Monique Wittig
        • The Loudest Self
        • Clear and Fierce
        • (B) Orderlands' Lullaby
        • Borderlands
        • akaDARKNESS: on Kathy Acker
        • Remembering Barbara Macdonald
        • The Making of Power
        • Octavia Butler: A note on Xenogenesis as a love story
        • The Essential Angel: Tillie Olsen
        • Carol's Hands
        • Notes on Contributors (5)
      • Issue 4: The Wonderful & The Terrible (9/2006) >
        • Cunctipotence
        • Global Lovers
        • Our Lot
        • Doe a Deer
        • Degendering Sex: Undoing Erotic Alienation
        • Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire (What's Truth Got to Do With It?)
        • That Easter
        • Amazon Grace: Read it Aloud
        • Athene, 2002-2005
        • Notes on Contributors (4)
      • Issue 3: Love & Lust (2/2006) >
        • Conversation with Michele Causse
        • Chloto 1978
        • The Woman with the Secret Name
        • She is Still Burning
        • In the Beginning
        • Sanctuary
        • When Sex is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy
        • Arielle
        • Quotidian Love
        • Leverett
        • After Sappho's Fragments Tips for Natural Disasters Said Before
        • A Lesbian is a Memoir
        • Notes on Contributors (3)
      • Issue 2: Memory (12/2005) >
        • The Lost Days of Columbus
        • Agenesias of the Orld World
        • The Power of the Earth Shake/Rousing
        • Return to Earth
        • Forces of Nature
        • The Beauty Shop
        • The Other Shore
        • Notes on Contributors (2)
      • Issue 1: The Body (10/2004) >
        • Lovesick
        • Guerilla Girl Ponders the Situation
        • The Secret Pornographies of Republicans. What's left? Preferably Knot
        • Communing with Bears
        • TRIVIA LIVES: Division Street
        • After Reading: Les Gueilleres
        • Notes on Contributors (1)
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