She Wants It by Jill Soloway

Author:Jill Soloway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

9 MAKING HISTORY

I got home from San Francisco and ordered all of Eileen’s books. I stacked Maxfield Parrish on top of Inferno on top of Snowflake / different streets, alternating between reading her stuff and writing my own, getting hot in the neck and forehead. One sentence about how she writes drove me bananas. It was about how she goes out and dares the city to force poems out of her, how she experiences life and waits for the gusts. The way her voice moved, it was so sure of itself and so sure of queerness, describing wanting the highs and the lows, the sky and the weird little restaurants and animals and pussies and fucking and women and girls, and how that want had felt for decades. That’s me trying to write like her. Her words were more like: The ocean / is a feast / & it’s here / I bring my / water tree book / feet, taste.

I was six months into queerness. I wanted to mainline.

We talked on the phone every night. She sent me the galley for her new collection of poetry and I read her poems back to her in funny character voices. I can do a really spot-on old southern civil servant gentleman, a crusty slow-talking conservative, and he sounded really funny slogging his way through her words, which were meant to be read from sweaty woman to sweaty woman. Together we imagined this man accidentally picking the wrong book off the shelf at the library and doing a stilted reading to astonished patrons:

When I read books I think of my cunt. If it’s about love of God, the hotter I get.

Then I’d flip, phone book–style, to another page and keep reading oh-so-slowly in that man’s voice:

Oh Love, I love you so much. The crying babies of the sirens pass through the town, I am expected to do more and more and more.

I wrapped myself in her inside-out shame—open, open, open—then got on an airplane and went to New York.

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