Written by Ellen Bass. For more Jewrotica poems by Ellen, check out God and the G-Spot.
Ellen is the author of The Human Line (Copper Canyon), Mules of Love (BOA) and Like A Beggar, to be published in early 2014 by Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review. She co-edited No More Masks!, the first major anthology of women’s poetry (Doubleday) and is co-author of The Courage to Heal and Free Your Mind (HarperCollins). She teaches in MFA program at Pacific University.
Ordinary Sex
If no swan descends
in a blinding glare of plumage,
drumming the air with deafening wings,
if the earth doesn’t tremble
and rivers don’t tumble uphill,
if my mother’s crystal
vase doesn’t shatter
and no extinct species are sighted anew
and leaves of the city trees don’t applaud
as you zing me to the moon, starry tesserae
cascading down my shoulders,
if we stay right here
on our aging Simmons Beauty Rest,
dumped into the sag in the middle,
that’s okay.
You don’t need to strew rose petals
in my bath or set a band of votive candles
flickering around the rim.
You don’t need to invent a thrilling
new position, two dragonflies
mating on the wing. Honey,
you don’t even have to wash up after work.
A little sweat and sunscreen
won’t bother me.
Take off your boots, babe,
swing your thigh over mine. I like it
when you do the same old thing
in the same old way.
And then a few kisses, easy, loose,
like the ones we’ve been
kissing for a hundred years.
Celebrating 10 Years & Marking the End of An Amazing Project
Celebrating 10 Years & Marking the End of An Amazing Project
I stepped out of my comfort zone to be a part of this. I was glad to open up the topic of sexuality in my community. We are trying to build a safe space to talk about sex. The result I am most happy about coming from this event is that hopefully now my friends know they can come and talk to me, that I can be their ‘safe space’.
I’m Heshy Fried from Frum Satire and I am very, very frum. And I completely support Jewrotica – it’s doing a service to the frum community. We need some sort of kosher sexual education. Jewrotica even has a system that allows frum filters to filter out certain things to make it PG for us. It’s mamish Torah. It’s like The Little Midrash Says for sex.
I had a great time deejaying at the Jewrotica event at Columbia University. The live readings were hilarious, informative, and in some cases, deeply moving. I know that I, along with many of my AEPi fraternity brothers, loved being able to connect our Judaism and our sexuality in a way that made all of us feel comfortable and welcome. I look forward to being a part of this again in the future!
Jewrotica was everything I had dreamed of and more: sexy attendees, tantalizing confessions, and well-written literature to boot! More importantly, it empowers us Jews to reach inside and own our sexy selves and heritage!
Learning about sex and what’s right and wrong when it comes to sex from a Biblical standpoint was an eye opening experience. I completely enjoyed it and think something like this could be a very cool thing to bring to even high school aged Jewish youth groups.
The people behind Jewrotica are quite quality! I have confidence that any project these folks take on will be equally quality.
Such an amazing experience! The Sarah Lawrence Jewrotica workshop was more than I could have ever expected – a comfortable, safe, sultry environment where participants clearly felt good about sharing or listening to each other’s intimate experiences and relating them to sexy stories from the Torah. From the moment the workshop began, Ayo had a sweet presence that was kinetic and spread around the room; her storytelling abilities had everyone enraptured and made the conversation topics relata… Read more
Jewrotica is awesome. It expands the mind and for people who were raised with narrow views on sexuality. Whether you are Jewish or not, or in different sects of Judaism like Orthodox, Conservative or Reform, no matter what your background or where you’re from, Jewrotica gets you to see Judaism and how it relates to sexuality in new ways. I really appreciate Ayo being here and helping us learn different ways to connect with our sexuality.
Jewrotica is a great way to ask interesting questions about the interplay between sensuality and Jewish wisdom. Check it out.
At Jewrotica’s Evening of Bedside Readings, students declaimed monologues on sexual encounters that had a Jewish twist. At Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the speakers pushed their own boundaries by performing a range of explicit narratives that challenged how the audience thought of the relationship to Judaism and sex. During the speakers’ preparation, the arguments about which narratives would be appropriate forced students to take a stand and voice their opinion on their own beliefs about Judaism an… Read more
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