I've always felt there is a sort of common experience young lesbian women share when we come of age in the world. There's a certain ennui about it, a certain acceptance of utter hopelessness--like 'Yes, I acknowledge that I will be crushed by this world, and so what? Let it crush me.'

This is a poem about being young, gay, and female in a misogynistic and homophobic culture, and how it feels to find yourself in the middle of that, with other women going through the same thing.

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"Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women. But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act of resistance. It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties."

- Adrienne Rich

in the evenings you talk pretty

and the smoke that billows out your mouth

is gray clouds, rain for forty days but we’ll sleep through

all of them, wake up after dinnertime. dance for forty nights.

we’ll forget all about the weather and the way the sun moves

even when we don’t want it to. we’ll forget to think about

how the old songs on the radio are just old songs now

and the people who sing them are dead.

we’ll forget about the way our mother’s hands felt cold,

the way our father’s breath sounded strange through

the telephone, so faraway—

the phone calls all the way from Oz.

it was a long bed that night

the way you kissed me sideways

and i fell asleep instantly

knocked out by the pure white knuckles

of punch drunk love

it was movies playing with the television on mute

the two of us talking loud about nothing just to make

sound happen, to make a memory

of a dull moment

it was an endless arc of light

from glittering city to glimmering town

we drove towards nothing, remembered nothing

except in fractures or bruises or photographs

the marks, and the marks from marks, and the lips

which split in the cold and bled into our mouths

as we cried out for orgasm in the dim gray fog of the bars,

and strange hands pulled us like children into the dark

and the next night nothing, just the two of us, alone

loose change in the center console and empty cups

all the smoke from your cigarettes, the windows rolled up

as i moved the dials on the radio and wondered

if you’d fallen asleep