The word lesbian threw itself around
and we sat, all of us, five or six bodies deep
with hardback covers gripped, offered up as
proof that we'll read what you write
if you write us into it, and some of us
murmured our memory of Patience and Sarah,
or how Isabel Miller brought us through her
heroines' trials to show us love could conquer
between hushed covers that bind
all the words not said out loud, together.

It's been twenty years since Winterson's
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
brought the revival to town with Jesus
between the bodies of two adolescent women,
and now your Night Watch blitzes us
with Helen and Julia and a world war in London.
Did you see the audience lean forward, braced,
when someone asked if you'd write for lesbians,
for us, again, but in America, with a Yankee slang
for Tipping the Velvet (does that really mean
going down?). The whole audience was hungry
for more of themselves in your fiction.
"In my own country," you explained,
"I have a wider fan base, but there's
the lesbians, too, of course."

04/11/2006

Posted on 04/11/2006
Copyright © 2024 Angela Cotterman