Irène can’t remember how it started — at what precise moment the joy began to leak out of her, like air from a punctured tyre. Did she glimpse her reflection in a shop window one gloomy afternoon? Did someone make a hurtful remark that slowly abraded her heart? Or did her melancholy have a purely physical cause: the diminishing flow of a certain secretion; some hormonal imbalance or neurological disorder?

“Why don’t you come to Berlin with me?” I asked, and I still remember the look on your face. We were walking in Chinatown, past the park on Bayard Street where the Chinese men practice tai-chi on Saturday mornings. We had barely started seeing each other, it hadn’t been very long. But I wanted to gift you some easy joy—something grand, yet sweet as a Jolly Rancher—because you seemed so surprised by it all.

Tortula muralis. Does that feel too formal to you? Wall screw-moss, then. I’ve seen you every day that I’ve lived in this flat, your green cushion gently hooked onto the garden’s brick wall. I could have so easily pulled you away whole, brought you inside. Instead, I brushed my hands against your tender body. Tapped my fingers along the sporophytes you extend into the air above you. And I have thought only of your softness.

I think I have experienced ten to fifteen truly erotic moments in my life, by which I mean moments during which I felt a strong sexual charge that was both entirely plausible and entirely uncorroborated.

“I’m not going to die yet, and a strange guy with horns is determined to give me oral pleasure. It’s just that... out of all the worst-case scenarios I’ve come up with since being abducted by aliens, being licked until I come isn’t anywhere on the list.”

My unshaven legs dangle out of the fourth-floor window of my apartment in Berlin as I flick through the latest adventure in the Ice Planet Barbarians universe. The erotic sci-fi series with seven-foot blue males with horns, tails and cocks the size of baseball bats has become my life. Thirty books into the series, I have given up all pretence of reading the serious prose stacked on my nightstand. The set-up of each book is similar and comforting. There may be quirks and twists in the world-building but, at heart, a girl is abducted, meets a monstrous-but-handsome alien, hijinks ensue, and fucking abounds.

There was a big purity politics hubbub recently about how sex scenes in movies are unnecessary and gratuitous. This is some tenderqueer “no-kink-at-pride”-but-still-has-a-day-job-with-Lockheed-Martin bullshit.

There’s an old cover of the Erotic Review (Issue 100 from June 2009) that depicts a birthday lunch to celebrate the magazine’s 100th edition. The scene is one of revelrous, risqué chaos: women with their tops off pop bottles of champagne, sex toys — seemingly given out as party favours — are strewn across the furnishings, and one woman, seen only from behind (her skirt hoisted up to reveal her stockings, suspenders, and rather sexless knickers) is, to put it crudely, sucking off a man under the table while simultaneously fondling another out of shot.

Beyoncé opens for herself on the Renaissance World Tour. Ballads, callbacks, and covers, the set showcases the lineages and legacies of Black women. For twenty minutes, Bey lines up planets and stars, constellations.
One night, in a black dress with a trellis design, silver lines connecting crystals to form diamonds, she descends from a chrome piano. Fielding a demand from the audience for the visuals, this queen, her own jester—the biggest troll—says, You are the visual, baby.

Attenuations of ginger fray to ahistorical glia, as
Stretching chest from which brief tresses are pulled,
And Areolis discs of freshly bathed plume
Shimmy aria coos among scents of the,
Still elsewhen, lingering drift of
Parasentient chiffon adown
The bankless radiating slopes
Of my epigenetic allelochemical aura.

When I miss America, when I miss the heady American cycle of extremity and shame— glutting and then repenting with such extremity the penitence is itself a kind of glutting, abstaining until the abstinence is as voluptuous as excess—I look at r/gooncaves.

A few definitions. Gooning refers to entering a state of trance-like, porn-fueled masturbation. It’s edging plus: the idea is to hold off orgasm essentially indefinitely and fall into a sort of a drooling state of ecstasy. Consuming a profound amount of porn is integral to this.