Desire

Oh desire, desirer—“to draw down the stars.” Once I knew the stars as a whorled song in my cosmic crown: that is, as part of me. Once I knew desire as its own fulfillment. I crawled into the dank space beneath my grandfather’s pale blue and rusting mobile home, a shelter where to sniff petunias through the lattice, their aroma peppery and sweet. I bruised the tender petals between my fingers.

​I was a fox kit, a witch, a girl. 

My nostrils flared.

As a girl I knew how to sniff out ecstasy where it was hidden, flowing in rivulets beneath the dark soil, beckoning my supple senses open, open, open. If I was not given then I stole. Stealing away into my privacy with nature, dangling by my knees from a leafy limb. Staining my soles with dark mulberries, popping them furtively into my mouth. There was pleasure in not being seen, in secret covenants with the earth. ​

Also, there is risk embedded in this girl savoring what’s hidden, underneath, unsanctioned by culture:

​I met my own loneliness, rage, impotence, indignation.
​

We, coming early to culture, repressed and choked by it, our beautiful mouths stopped up with gags, pollen, and short breaths; we the labyrinths, we the ladders, we the trampled spaces; the stolen and the flights...

-Hélène Cixous, "Sorties"

As a teenager I remember forgetting my house key and pushing the patio table to stand under the kitchen window, prying off the screen, and climbing in. My uniform skirt snagged on the bricks, my thighs bare and scraped, I shed my propriety often—in favor of some deeper dignity: no place—and no part of myself—barred from me. 

I broke into my own home. I had to.

As women and girls do and will, until the bolted speechless doors of pleasure are flung wide open for us, by us.

I call these doors speechless, but not silent, not even voiceless. 

Hear it? This murmuring in the belly of women’s unmitigated desire, of our lust for ourselves, of what we’ve been banned from expressing yet. Yet, here we are: speaking, singing, praising, drawing up utterances from the bog of our deep memory. 

Do you recognize this voice—curious, magnetic, impetuous—the longing that draws down the stars?

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