Syrup
Where I live
Ants find any sweetness.
Three Poems by Sequoia LeBreux
Making the Centipede a Perfect Morning
by Rushi Vyas
after Colin Walker and Haley Heynderickx
It is not about the sex.
It’s about the morning light
funneling through the window’s sheer
white drapes onto the many-legged and red
centipede who claims the wallContinue Reading
The Elvis Machine–Poems by Kim Vodicka
M i l k P T S D
I don’t play to lose, but I played, and I lost.
Hard being sexless for knowing someone’s heart.
Cross to Bear–Poems by Afieya Kipp
mon objet
I do not want to rinse you off me. I do not want to go. This war in me speaks loudest at night—as if all at once, the yin tide, pink, lush, and like a lather—your love salve—I take in with the largest mouthfuls from the most beautiful silver spoon…As it turns out, once my organs are satiated from the swell brought of the raw honey well, everything shifts into perspective where white wine has clotted to a bubble at the bottom of glasses where sunlight turns half your body to gold, begging to be licked
Real Talk
by Doug Paul Case
I can’t stop thinking about this .gif I saw
on Tumblr a few days ago: Jake Bass
licking some anonymous man’s penis andContinue Reading
The Gynecologist
by Margaret Reynolds
The doctor pushes me back and asks me to scoot forward until the bottom of my butt is hanging off the edge of the exam table. She spreads my legs quickly. Without warning, I feel the hard edges of a speculum spread me open, and a moment later, she slides two wet fingers into me.
I feel the pressure deeply inside of me and blink at the ceiling to distract myself. When I turn my head to the side, I’m staring at a poster of a mother and child standing under the title “The Benefits of Breastfeeding.”Continue Reading
A Ritual for Rage
Bitch Niggas: In Support of Softness
by Steven Dunn
When men write about sexism they get praised to high heavens for it, although women have been talking about it, writing about it, making art about it, and living it for so fucking long. Initially I struggled to write about sexism because I felt that maybe it’s not mine to write. I want to contribute to the conversation in a way that isn’t colonizing. As men, we can take responsibility for what is ours: the many ways we participate in and continue to perpetuate sexism. Everything I say from here out, I’ve learned from listening to women and reading women’s works.Continue Reading
Fall 2018
Call for Submissions Summer ’18—Extended
The Thought Erotic is open for submissions for Summer/Fall 2018! Our reading period has been extended to September 3rd.
We’re looking for stories, poems, essays and art about sex and sexuality—narratives and images that shake up what our ideas of erotica and porn look like, of what they are and what they have the potential to be. We’re looking for celebrations of sex while acknowledging that it can be fraught with fear and trauma—recognizing that the sexiest thing might be a reclamation or flat-out rejection of current definitions and expressions of sex. We are looking for authors and characters that are underrepresented and unheard, especially around ownership of body, self and voice—for stories from and featuring people of color, people who identify as LGBT, queer and/or gender nonconforming, women and people with disabilities. We’re looking for a spectrum of sexual expression, from vanilla to kinky. We’re looking for fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction (from lyric essay to cultural critique) and visual art.
The Thought Erotic features stories and essays where sexuality is a site of empowerment, of ownership of one’s own body, identity and story. It is a place to re-story and reclaim some of our cultural ideas around sex + sexuality. To take back/undermine/undo the heteronormative, sexist, racist, cissexist, patriarchal narrative of what sex is and looks like.
Our open reading period again has been extended to September 3rd, 2018. Please see our submissions page for more details and to submit your work!
