The Chasing Iamb

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits."
-- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?

When you get nervous, it's so hard not to.
When you're expected to come in something
other than your ordinary way, to
take pleasure in the new way, lost, not knowing

how to drive it back to sureness ... where are
the thousand thousand flowers I always pass,
the violet flannel, then the sharpness?
You can't, you can't ... extinguish the star

in a burst. It goes on glowing. That head
0between your legs so long. Could it really
want to be there? One whimpers as though ...
then gets mad. One could smash the others valiant head.

"You didn't come, did you?" Naturally, he knows.
Although I try to lie, the truth escapes me
almost like an orgasm itself. Then the "No"
that should crack a world, but doesn't, slips free.

Molly Peacock