Sensual Sunday – You Are Going Gray

Sensual Sunday is meant to be writing practice.  I’m looking to hone my ability to write about sensual things or even to write sensually about regular things.

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You Are Going Gray

The soft smell of your spice.  Clove and salt tears.

Peachy, with black curls of hair, down, down, down.

Earthy musk, the taste of you…all of you.

Inside of me.  Each space filled.  And a woman has many spaces.

Slip, slide, into place.  Nestle there.  Rested there.  In your hair.

The smell of the top of your head.  Tickle, soft brown and pewter.  Pewter…what a word.  The color describes the soft turning of your fields from ripe wheat to stoney silver.  You’re only more beautiful for it.  But the word itself – pewter – is wrong because I don’t like the feel of it in my mouth.  And everything about you feels so good in my mouth.

In the dark it’s hard to tell what year it is.  Are we new or has it really been so many years?  The smell of the building and your skin and these sheets and my own spent aromas, a perfume I know well.  The sounds of the whirring fans, creaking branches just outside of our bedroom window, and your rhythmic breaths, just shy of a gentle snore, are such a familiar song.  Leaves dance shadows on the wall thrown there by streetlights as they have always done since the first day I slept next to you.  As you sleep, I watch them twist and rest.

Fairies and Goblins

I was looking around the internet for an illustration style to filter a photograph.  I was specifically seeking an Arthur Rackham filter.  Anybody who loves fairy paintings as much as I do has probably heard of Arthur Rackham.  In searching for that, I came across this:

Pretty sexy huh?  (Source)

Which is actually an image of a Kinuko Craft painting done in the Arthur Rackham style, from Playboy in the late 1970s.  Yes, Playboy!  Anyway, this illustration was done for something called “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, which it turns out, is a poem I’ve never heard of.  Below is an excerpt (it’s really long, y’all) and you can see the whole thing here.

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

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I’ve no reason to share this other than the fact I thought it was pretty neat.  But it also illustrates how the internet can derail your focus!  Even if a clear path is in front of me, I am stopping to look at all of the fruits and flowers along the way.  Also, I once wrote to Kinuko Craft in the 1990s when the internet was a lot newer. I had found a copy of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” that she had illustrated and I was absolutely ENCHANTED by her work.  An eager painter and artist, I wanted to tell her how much her work touched me.  She wrote back.  I wish I still had that computer with that hard drive with that email archive.  That year I had emails from the plus size model Emme, and artists Amy Brown and Jessica Galbreth – both who were newly artists at the time.  Also, that was back when ebay was new and reasonably priced, so it was easy to find good artists there that were selling their own work and weren’t some kind of import, mass-market artwork.

Sensual Sunday – Spring Forward

Sensual Sunday is a weekly sensual micro-story, poem or word association. It’s mostly sexy writing practice. I encourage others to do Sensual Sunday – share your links with me!

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Spring Forward

Springing, showing, sliding, slipping, slowly

Budding, blooming, bouncing, bobbing,

Out, obediently, outrageously, obsessed

Popping, pink, purple, passion, persist

Firming, fragile, fractured, forward, facing

Poking, pouncing, pounding, poking, perspire

Dangling, dancing, dappled, delicious, dizzying

Tempting, touching, tearing, turgid, tenacious, temple

Worship, watching, wishing, wincing, warping

Rocking, rolling, rising, reeling

Swelling, spurting, shooting, streaming

Careening, calling, calming, collapsing

Serenely, softly, sleeping, spent, sated

What I Learned from You

What I Learned From You

that strawberries and basil actually go well together
and i will never eat them

that some flowery scents can smell sweet
and then sour

that some people can seem sweet
and then bitter

and some people will be mad at you for believing their lies

and make you the villain in their story

so they don’t have to own any blame