Learning from Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic
Oh to ache!
Oh that deep twisting your name has become, that forgotten
contortion, evidence that this fabled organ still exists.
Oh to have a heart and feel it curl for you.
(But this isn’t a poem about you.)
In many ways, mythically and literally, I am learning the power of the erotic.
Unfortunately in the early stages of learning, most desire feels like detoxing some
unnamed substance, a drug you can’t remember taking.
Like it could come crawling out of your pores someday soon, and you would say:
“Ah ha! Here is my plague!”
The great atrophied state of lust comes to me in dreams.
I wake up wet, feeling good & feeling god.
Audre?
Where can I keep the dreams I have of you during the day?
Where can I tuck fever?
Where can I find my secret pouch, vestigial, that all lovers have?
Despite my dislocation,
I am learning to want but not need. To feel my wholeness
instead of touching the polaroid of myself I keep in my wallet
I am learning to exist without vignette.
And tonight, as the seconds drag my body, slick, towards
sunrise, I am learning to sweat and want and leak and dream.
And this is how I track my learning, drip by drip.