You don't know winter until you've walked with stubble grazes on your inner thighs
"Winter" by Timothy Liu
Happy Ex/rotic Friday!
Here’s a spectacular poem by Timothy Liu to whet your whistle for the weekend.
Timothy Liu is a contemporary American poet known for his lyrical intensity, innovative use of form, and exploration of themes such as desire, identity, and memory.
As a queer writer, Liu's poetry often grapples with questions of sexuality, intimacy, and the complexities of human relationships.
Liu's poetry is characterised by its evocative imagery, its musicality, and its willingness to confront taboo subjects with honesty and grace. His collections, including "Vox Angelica" and "Don't Go Back to Sleep," reflect on themes ranging from love and loss to addiction and spirituality with a profound sense of empathy and vulnerability.
One of Liu's most notable works is his poem "Sperm Ecstatic," which offers a candid exploration of desire and longing from a queer perspective. In this poem, Liu celebrates the beauty and power of eroticism while also acknowledging its complexities and contradictions, inviting readers to embrace the fullness of their desires without shame or apology.
Winter by Timothy Liu How long will the bed that we made together hold us there? Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered particles now, islands of shaving foam slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops stippling the water pink as I kiss the back of your neck, our faces framed inside a medicine cabinet mirror. The blade of your hand carves a portal out of steam, the two of us like boys behind frosted glass who wave goodbye while a car shoves off into winter. All that went unnoticed till now — empty cups of coffee stacked up in the sink, the neighborhood kids up to their necks in mounds of autumn leaves. How months on a kitchen calendar drop like frozen flies, the flu season at its peak followed by a train of magic-markered xxx’ s — nights we’ d spend apart. Death must work that way, a string of long distance calls that only gets through to the sound of your voice on our machine, my heart’ s mute confession screened out. How long before we turn away from flowers altogether, your blind hand reaching past our bedridden shoulders to hit that digital alarm at delayed intervals — till you shut it off completely.
Liu has often addressed the importance of explicit sexual or violent imagery in his poetry, stating, “Language is erotic, intended or not. Some of the poems … toy with cultural taboos as well, and therefore are obscene, that is ‘offstage.’ … Many of my poems seek to stage linguistic tropes and situations that have been largely left out of poetic discourse, thus releasing textual energies that our culture seeks to suppress.”
Join the chaos, stir the pot, and add a splash of mayhem to the mix. Your support keeps the chaos brewing and the creativity flowing. Let's shake things up together! By pot, I mean coffee, and by mayhem, I mean caramel syrup. It’s all very much the same thing in alarmingly different trousers of varying levels of practicality. Come strut.