Sex Positive Lit Mags That Want Your Spicy Words (Featuring Suzanne Grove)
The Garlic Aioli BLT list
This week Suzanne Grove writes a mini essay on the intertwining of sex and food in her work, with examples from a short story she is currently editing. Below that, you will find a list of sex positive magazines that are looking for your spicy fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
The bedrooms of my fiction have become cast iron skillets, an egg cracked against the rim, the yolk spread and dripping.
I imagine a hand cradling the hard dome of the shell. The fingers arched, wrist tilted back and exposed, thin sheath of calcium carbonate held with the kind of brief tenderness that can only come before annihilation, collapse. Then the whip of the radiocarpal joint, the synchronized movement of tendon and muscle and bone. Impact, shatter. The oil slick of the pan, the translucent gloss of water and protein firming. Disruption, then transformation.
Often, I write sex as a rupture, the soft core of the body twanging, strung up tight, then released.
The scenes occur not only in those bedrooms and atop their corresponding mattresses, but also on peeling laminate floors and the backseats of Broncos, leather like a slap to the thighs. Against the stiff bark of a tree rendered spongy with moss and walls textured with brushstrokes, the drywall compound pitched high and sharp enough to scratch the skin. A series of objects capable of retaining heat, surfaces against which my characters bend, brace, and straddle.
I write:
I don’t think we went more than 72 hours without our bodies grinding away beside some dilapidated industrial park or extinct Kmart, the skeletal shelves of the gardening center waiting patiently to be bulldozed and transformed into something new. Everything in me tensed and softened at once. Open, but unbearably taught. My body glazed in the yolk of all that wanting.
That word—yolk—appears, again and again.
Whip. Melt. Tongue.
Flood, umami, dissolve, sticky, knead, honeyed, peel, ripe.
Salt, too. Always salt.
My work shares a similar vocabulary with my favorite cookbooks, each glossary and index like a mirror reflection of the descriptions I attempt to surrender myself to in order to get the feeling right on the page. I frequently read poems before I write, and I think often of the hunger inside Czesław Miłosz’s “A Confession” and the “tendrilled craving” in Saeed Jones’s “Kudzu.” Of the bread and salt and heat in Dorianne Laux’s “This Close” and the “drowsy metaphors” of Chaia Heller’s “After Language.” Ellen Bass’s figs. And this, from “Lust” by Yusef Komunyakaa: “He longs to be / An orange, to feel fingernails / Run a seam through him.”
Apparently, when I think about sex, I also think about food. And I’ve been thinking about both.
A lot.
I’m currently editing a short story. A father fails to return from a hunting trip in British Columbia, leaving behind his daughter, my narrator. It appears there has been no freak accident. No drowning, no errant bullet. The extension of his getaway: a choice. The daughter, newly nineteen, subsists on found bottles of Black Velvet whisky and frozen venison and old issues of Vogue until the arrival of her uncle, a man who stands too closely when he speaks, whose eyes spark and linger. Her mother? Long gone. “Death,” the daughter narrates, “is just a different kind of vanishing act.” This new living situation with Uncle Lonnie introduces her to the story’s eponymous “Coach,” and their meeting serves as the inciting indecent. I wanted to write about familial abandonment and loneliness, about how money can, in fact, lead to happiness through opportunity—to rest, to receive an education, to simply feed oneself. About the men we grant our praise and attention, but also a learned obliviousness: “He was oddly popular but invisible, and I learned that certain men are granted this strange, flickering combination of admiration and freedom.” But more than anything, I wanted to give my protagonist agency. I wanted to write her sexuality onto the page, unfiltered and unafraid. A refusal to erase the very real intensity of her lust, even in the shadow of a man’s horrific behavior. No excuses, no justifications or explanations for her desire. How often did a woman’s appetite have to be accounted for with some emotional rationale or harrowing bit of backstory while a man’s need was simply allowed to exist?
In revision, I outline the beats and trim for clarity and pacing. I flesh out and rework. I kill nearly all the darlings, although I tend to agree more with R.O. Kwon’s thoughts on that particular piece of craft advice: “Why would I cut, let alone kill, that which most delights me?” When I take a pass with a specific eye on description and metaphor—always thinking of Ocean Vuong’s advice—I arrive at a new understanding of how sex and food mingle.
Throughout the story, food often functions as shorthand for the current state of my protagonist’s life. The damp hot dog buns at the Frontier League baseball stadium where she works as she watches groups of women her age pour vodka into their waxy cups of fountain soda, wishing she could be included on the receiving end of their whispers, feel their beath hot on her neck. The local Texas Roadhouse, where a player takes her for food and beer, as long as the cost of her menu items doesn’t exceed an allotted amount. The processed and plastic-wrapped singles of sliced cheese in Uncle Lonnie’s otherwise empty refrigerator. A desolate culinary landscape, until Coach steps into her life:
For breakfast, I treated myself. My favorite bagels, the dough so dense, the shining outer crust of them crackling between my teeth, a glut of cream cheese and lox with a big cup of coffee made velvet with cream. At the local Shop N’ Save, I bought tins of expensive cashews and olives. Smoked gouda and potato chips. I ate it all.
She is newly discovering her hunger, sexual and otherwise, and for the first time in a long time she allows herself the pleasure of food. The lox and the cream and the chips are a small but radical act of self-care.
As a narrator, she is someone who pays attention, who is learning how to act toward herself and others with care. While drafting this essay and reworking my story, I fully comprehend that food is care, and care means paying attention. Haven’t I spent my life wanting to cook and to eat in a way that requires—no, demands—my attention?
I think of Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: “There is ecstasy in paying attention.”
As an editor, my most frequently given piece of advice is to lean into specificity. This necessitates attention to detail.
We craft recipes from details: mince the shallot; cool slightly; only until toasted; just before serving.
We build stories from details.
We make meaning in the details.
Isn’t this true of the best sex, too?
In July, we watch fireworks, and I think about plot.
The anticipation of the explosion, the electric rain, the ghosted fragments of incandescence.
Traditional three-act structure.
My partner and I lean against a railing across from Pittsburgh’s Point State Park, boats rocking in small waves on the Allegheny River. We’re talking about energy and vibrations, the deep, expansive boom that echoes in our chests. Occasionally, the scent of fish wafts to us. A muskiness like wet earth. Between hushed exclamations, I sense a shift in the crowd’s energy, a listlessness emerging in the middle of the production. The sagging midway point we often talk about so much as writers.
But I’m alert, awake. I’m aware not of the fireworks but of the space between my body and his body next to mine. I’m always aware of this distance, its tension: the friction between what I want and what I do not have. Perhaps another useful literary definition.
I notice the twist of hair at the collar of his T-shirt, the curl of it down his arms. The heft of his thighs and thickness of his hands, their bulk. But more than the animal physicality: his mind. At some point, we talk about the science behind how the lights from the bridge reflect in the water. He uses metaphorical language to intensify and clarify, to deepen meaning. More than one acting coach I’ve encountered has suggested that the craft of performance boils down to listening. Sometimes, I think the same is true of writing. As a listener, I am at my best when in conversation with my partner. He doesn’t call himself a writer, but he creates the best metaphors of nearly anyone I know.
When I offer a rebuttal to something he’s said, I think, This is pleasure.
This kind of paying attention.
In my short story, Coach’s attention to detail creates an initial sense of intimacy and trust for my protagonist. But, by the end, it’s a lack of attention to detail—a moment of carelessness—that ends the affair. On the final pages, she finds herself in the near future, waitressing to earn enough money to pay for classes at the community college, credits she will transfer to a state university with a teaching certification in her sights. A small apartment, extra shifts, no excess. Except for the meals she cooks with her roommate. Thickly marbled steaks fragrant with rosemary and butter. Together they eat, and study. She’s still grappling with the relationship and its fallout, attempting to understand the reality of her experience: “In acknowledging the truth of our power imbalance, why was my own agency and desire always eliminated from the equation? I wanted something from Coach, too. I was hungry.”
Later, on that same July night, my partner and I find ourselves in a hotel room.
The sanitized air from the air conditioning unit, too cold. The starch of white sheets. A greasy sheen to the particleboard furniture.
We keep the lights on, searching for details. We find each other. Once, then again.
In the morning, I’m aware of the space between our bodies. Of the salt on his skin and the thrumming inside me, ready to be broken open.
I move toward closing the gap.
I am hungry. In a way that requires—no, demands—my attention.
My sandwich recipe is a classic, and I think the very nature of its simplicity requires extra attention: A Garlic Aioli BLT from Food & Wine. My only bit of advice here is to move slowly while you assemble. Give yourself the pleasure of noticing. Oh, and one of the ingredients? One large egg yolk.
Weekly Specials: 10 Sex Positive Lit Mags Waiting for Your Submission.
Honey Literary
A BIPOC-focused literary journal / 501(c)(3) literary arts organization built by women of color. In our founding year of 2020, we denounce the overwhelming homogeneity of the literary landscape as well as Eurocentric traditions of writing
Genre: Nonfiction, poetry, interview, art
Special Sauce: “My greatest loves (besides poetry) will always be food and sex. Who doesn't want to spend an afternoon with a sandwich (made with focaccia), a dirty martini, and an issue filled with poems and creative works about pleasure, queer friendship, and sexuality? Honey Literary is a queer as hell space, and this cycle, we're especially pushing our Sex+, Valentines, and (new) Food and Beverage sections. We're especially eager to read more works by aro and ace writers, as well as pieces on queer relationships. As always: body-positive, kink-friendly, respect, and consent.” - Dorothy Chan