guest series

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

 

DILDON’T

 

http://metro.co.uk/2015/04/26/remember-your-loved-one-by-putting-their-ashes-in-a-dildo-5168393/

 

Your lover can fuck you beyond the grave.
I’m just going to put this here:
a widow has needs. If you crave
your lover’s dick, from beyond the grave
his ash is yours, forever your slave
encapsulated in plastic gear.
I can fuck myself beyond his grave –
I’m just going to put this here.

 

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hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

TWO SHADES OF GREY

 

I. Dear Mr. Grey:

All new lovers need to learn restraint.
Unless it’s sexy fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Your Red Room of Pain may make me faint
with desire: all lovers could use some restraint,
someone to show the ropes, the cuffs, the quaint
trappings of bondage, to come on strong.
But while all lovers need to learn some restraint,
your controlling lack of fun is doing it wrong. Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/3d-print-sex-toys-ups_n_6240784.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-sex

 

UPS redefines package delivery:
betting if you build it, they will come,
they’re providing a new service (for a fee).
UPS redesigns package delivery,
equipping 100 of their stores with 3D
printers (used to make sex toys by some,
but then, UPS defines “package delivery”).
If you build it, they will come.

 

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hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

VALENTINE’S DAY BREAK-IN AT FUNERAL HOME

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2015/02/13/3564129_homeless-man-charged-with-necrophilia.html?rh=1

I like how we don’t need to talk.
Sometimes sex just leaves you cold,
you know? And women usually mock
how I don’t really want to talk,
but you, I’d place on a catafalque.
There’s not a lot who fill your mold.
I like how you don’t ever talk.
Sometimes sex just leaves you cold.

 

***

hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

ONLY CONNECT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/hook-up-apps/

 

With the newest, latest App
there’s many ways to make a connection:
with Tinder, Grinder, and 3nder, you’ll tap
(with the newest, latest App)
every horny lovelorn on the digital map,
and with Hulu, proof you’re free of infection.
Without the newest, latest App,
how’d we ever make a Basic connection?

 

***

hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

 

I’m a poet with a confession to make: I love writing in form. I know that seems conservative and tame, but verse can actually be quite subversive. I love the way the language presses up against the constraints of form’s corset, the heat it produces. As I’ve written elsewhere:

 …I prefer restriction in my diction,
meter’s mastery, the subtle friction
of stress at work, the language modified.
You would not imagine how straight-laced
I am, inside my bedroom, verse encased.

For my April guest column, I offer you a series of triolets about interesting sex titbits in the news. The triolet is a French tickler of a repeating form that’s like a compressed villanelle, a fun amuse-bouche for these short-takes on recent risqué events. Enjoy! Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Sara Lippmann

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“My Compliance,” by Sara Lippmann

That summer, we went to The Sagamore in Lake George. It was the first and only time my family, paternal grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, took a vacation together outside of a mandatory, claustrophobic Passover hotel. Mostly, we saw each other on High Holidays. My father had a fraught relationship with his younger brother; my mother didn’t click with her in-laws, who shrank from the word “lobster” as if it were cancer while she couldn’t get enough. But there we were.

Here I am: on the left beside my first cousin. There is no date on the back of the photograph. I’m guessing August 1979. August 1980.Fullscreen capture 352015 82925 AM

35 years. How reliable is my memory, how good? A few isolated details break through the fog, but questions loom. New information passed along later has penetrated my consciousness, become subsumed as fact. Secrets persist. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jennifer Pieroni

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“Jump,” by Jennifer Pieroni

jenpieroni.jpg

 Here I am at the age of four training a kitten.

If I could, I’d invite five kittens like this in today, just to watch what they do. I can’t. It’s unfortunate that in my late thirties, I’m suddenly allergic and also the responsibility of the litter box is a constant back and forth between my husband me, neither one of us eager to own the job of cleaning it. So we have just one cat.

 I have never thought about the earliest circumstances that led me to understand how little control I have of others. My current opinion is: I have none. It’s like if I could have all of the kittens in the world, I wouldn’t condescend to them. I wouldn’t expect them to oblige me, not in any way, because I know they probably won’t. I know they might not ever. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Deborah Jiang-Stein

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“The Fuel of Rejection,” by Deborah Jiang-Stein

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I love to roller-skate. It’s one of my favorite things to do, a place where risk is safe, most of the time, and where the smooth surface in the roller rink and good wheels and bearings make all the difference in the ride. A few derby leagues have invited me to guest skate, that’s how much I love it.

Skating feeds my appetite for risk, especially since I’ve removed the rubber toe stops. I skate without brakes because it’s also how I’ve lived in most ways. I’m still learning how to “brake” in life.

Writing Prison Baby, took my guts as a skater and the same threshold for risk. And, I had to learn what to filter, where to “brake.” Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Nadine Darling

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” Haircut,” by Nadine Darling

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I got the classic Mia Farrow “Rosemary’s Baby” haircut for my 35th birthday, at Vidal Sassoon in Boston. It was planned meticulously; I called the salon and asked for my hair to be cut by the director, a man named named Jacques. He had the most experience, they said, but he was also the most expensive. I assured them that that was fine. My mother was paying.

After donning my silky robe and having my hair washed by a tiny woman with several facial piercings and stomping Doc Martens, Jacques stood behind my chair and brushed my wet hair out with his fingers. His age seemed impossible to know. He had some kind of accent- not really French, but something. Chains that hung from his leather pants clinked like silverware with the slightest movement. We looked at me in the mirror. He asked me what I wanted and I told him. He was not surprised, but he smiled, his hands still in my hair. Continue reading →