Elaine Equi

Can you imagine waking up every morning on a different planet, each with its own gravity? Slogging, wobbling, wavering. Atilt and out-of-sync with all that moves and doesn’t. Through years of trial and mostly error did I study this unsteady way — changing pills, adjusting the dosage, never settling. A long time we were separate, O Earth, but now you have returned to me.

An arty feline couple parodies bourgeois gender roles and literary values before the days of  YouTube.

A flowery old-fashioned kind of speechlessness.

Looking at Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids, I learn that he liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women, both shaved and un’—all giving a good whiff to the camera. But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman voices reveling in the background. But even when silent, the dingy phone is a sex organ—cock asleep in its cradle.