do you not weep?

“I want to feel again the violent thumping inside of me, the rushing, burning blood, the slow, caressing rhythm and the sudden violent pushing…"

"I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them."

— Anaïs Nin, from 'A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953'

"Instruct me in the dark."

— Louise Glück, The House on Marshland; from ‘Under Taurus’

"You’d need to make an effort to be quiet / when I knelt down and got my fingers full / of you, my mouth on you, against the wall. / You’d pull my hair. You’d have to bite your tongue."

— Marilyn Hacker, from 'Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons'

"I want to do everything to you tonight."

"I want you. I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit […] I want to own you, use you, I want to fuck you, I want to teach you things."

"Ah, to see you really drunk sometime, that would be a treat! [...] when I think of how you press against me, how eagerly you open your legs and how wet you are, God, it drives me mad to think what you would be like when everything falls away."

— Henry Miller, quoted in 'Henry and June' by Anaïs Nin

"after I’d been inside you, O so deep / I thought we would be tangled at the roots. / I think we are."

— Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘III: Eight Days in April’

"(Dictate, dictate, I am down on my knees / Listening to you — with unquenchable thirst,"

— Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova: Uncollected Poems and Fragments 1957-1966; from ‘Grand Confession’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"He bit my breast. His language was foul. He entered me. / We’re the same, he said, That’s it. I swooned in my soul."

— Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife; from 'The Devil's Wife'

"Lie down, lie easy. / Let me shipwreck in your thighs."

— Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition; from ‘Verses and songs from Under Milk Wood: Captain Cat remembers Rosie Probert'

"Such a quiet night. / Only your voice murmuring / You’re wet, you want to"

— Louise Glück, The House on Marshland; from ‘The Letters’

"I plan to start on top and get there slowly, following the line of dark hairs down your belly…"

— Marilyn Hacker, from 'Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons'

"I am sitting here writing you with a tremendous erection. I feel your soft mouth closing over me, your leg clutching me tight, see you again in the kitchen here lifting your dress and sitting on top of me and the chair riding around over the kitchen floor, going thump, thump."

"When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest—that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking—and a bottle of Anjou in between…"

"I just see you in my arms, writhing, and feel myself deep in you and staying there forever. I’m hot as hell now…"

— Henry Miller, from 'A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953'

"I want to make you come / in my mouth like a storm."

— Marilyn Hacker, from 'Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons'

"Sometimes at night I think of how we did / It, me nailed in her like steel,"

— Louise Glück, Firstborn; from ‘My Life Before Dawn’

"Girl, I would have you any way / or where,"

— Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘I: Lesbian Ethics, or: Live Girl-Girl Sex Acts’

"Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling…"

— Oscar Wilde, from 'De Profundis'

"I can hardly remember you without feeling almost sick and getting aching erections. I shall pour all this into you on Saturday and fill you and fill myself with you and kill myself on you."

— Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes; to Sylvia Plath, 23rd October 1956

"God, I love / what you do to me at night when we’re alone, / how you wait for me to take you into me / until I’m so confused with you I can’t / stand up anymore."

— Kim Addonizio, Tell Me; from 'The Divorcée and Gin'

"…I will fuck you until the end of the world."

— Catherynne M. Valente, from 'Deathless'

"His hands so strong, he could do her all day. Worlds away from everything she had ever known."

— Janet Fitch, from 'Paint it Black'

"But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark – that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant."

— Tennessee Williams, from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

"You know where you’ll come if you come back to me."

— Marilyn Hacker, from Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘VIII: Estival Passage’

"After "good violent love," they read poems and spoke of Isis and horoscopes [...]"

— Heather Clark, from 'Red Comet; The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'

"Today, I ate an apple direct from a tree. Today, I thought of all the good things to put in my body. Today, I thought of you."

— Kristina Shue, from 'Literary Sexts: Volume 2'

"We fucked a flame into being."

— D. H. Lawrence, from 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'

"As we rolled on that narrow bed, I knew this was why one needed a body, why it was worth all the pain, the hunger and harm it was prey to, why the angels envied us."