#grace hanson hates poetry

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi

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Image text: Wish Please one more kiss in the kitchen before we turn the lights off

--W.S. Merwin (2016)

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi

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A Hill by Frank O’Hara

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi.

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi.

(+ previous entries about this poem sequence: Wolf Moon, Strawberry Moon.)

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inside weather

Merry Christmas, have some lesbian poetry from the 1950s:

I have some major Grace and Frankie feelings about this poem, which I’ve loved for years and have now read again for the first time since falling into the fandom. 

I sometimes (okay, often) enjoy rhyme, though I’d find rhyme this straightforward jarring if it weren’t for the utter softness and stillness and lived-in-ness of the subject. And I have every feeling in the world about the rhymes being separated, ABABCDDC, in the first stanza, with one slanted and another identical, the restoration of mental order after the anxiety of potential intrusion, and then, when they’re past the threshold to the outside and back inside the home and they’re sure they’re alone, the rhymes are paired up more tightly, at least at first, EEFFGGHIHI, and are no longer slanted. 

There’s a combination of work and inevitability that makes this domestic piece particularly lesbian, I think. A thing that takes great effort yet cannot be helped.

And the light insisting upon itself, illuminating the truth about these women’s lives that you can only see if you’re on the inside, inhabiting their space. The bittersweetness of things left unsaid, the many reasons (too dangerous, too special, too mundane, too complicated) for not speaking them aloud. And then the poem does it for them, but--unless you know what you’re reading--names only their stuff and the color of their walls. Gives their intimate interior lives a climate.

And one of them left the light on themselves--through an accident, a gift that reveals something beyond words.

Grace and Frankie is all about home-sharing for me. The unutterable necessity of their home together, and by extension their lives together, everything they “do not talk about / but have to have.” Queer intimacy. So many scenes with two chairs side by side.

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There’s no backing off once you’ve clung that hard.

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This is a small story for @sapphoshands, whose prompt included: sex, snuggles, a freshly made bed, and (yay!) #grace hanson hates poetry #but maybe not as much as she used to

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Post-S4. Rated M (sort of). 890 words of Grace Hanson, Intense Human.

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From Perihelion: A History of Touch by Franny Choi.