The Love and Desire Issue

WomenWhoEnvision.

CARVED VOICES |i

The

Love & Desire Issue

Bloom Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

Polyamory

By Page Turner

Page Turner is the editor-in-chief of the popular website Poly Land (https://poly.land), as well as an award-winning author. She’s been cited as a relationship expert in a variety of media publications including The Huffington Post, Glamour, Self, and Bustle. Her newest book is Dealing with Difficult Metamours.

Simply stated, polyamory is the practice of engaging simultaneously in more than one serious romantic or sexual relationship with the knowledge and consent of all partners.

But what does that really mean? What’s it actually like? And why in the world would you want to be polyamorous?

Usually, people think polyamory is just about having sexual access to more people. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve met plenty of people who enter into polyamorous arrangements looking for just that: greater sexual variety and more adventurous bedroom experiences!

However that’s far from the only reason to be polyamorous. And people who are first attracted to polyamory for sexual reasons will often come to find a myriad of other unexpected benefits that eventually come to mean a lot more in the long term than the shiny allure of hot, sexy, fun times.

I myself set out into polyamorous relationships with modest expectations. I thought it might be a total disaster but perhaps one that would leave me with an interesting story or two. Also, I was mostly trying it out because though I thought polyamory was a terrible idea in theory, when I was truly honest with myself, I had to admit that I didn’t really know. This bothered me. The fact that I was so dead set against something I had no direct experience with bothered me.

The last thing I expected to gain from polyamory was a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance and above all a large, mostly queer, chosen family. So naturally, that’s exactly what I ended up with.

Still from Stranger by the Lake, 2013

The Washroom at Platform’s End

By Aritra Chatterjee

If gender is a toy, I have been playing around with it since my earliest recollections of childhood. Bodies are my muse and their fragrance, their scars, the ways bodies choose to express themselves, how bodies communicate with each other feed the fountain of sporadic verses that shoot out of my mind in the most unpredictable moments. I do not know whether I am a poet, but I find poetry in longing, desire and resistance.

Here within the crunch of space, That barely fits us two, Oh, stranger of the night, We must hurry our lovemaking. The stench rises to high heavens And the nausea feels like the burden Of gazes that would tear us apart If it were not for the door-lock!

Forgetting Feet

By Sadia Khatri

Sadia Khatri is a writer based in Karachi. She writes fiction, non-fiction and essays on gender politics, cities, sci-fi and poetry. She is the cofounder of the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas. Her first non-fiction book, on the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, is forthcoming by Speaking Tiger.

Still from Ingmar Bergman's Persona, 1966

KARACHI

It’s a game every morning: to keep my desires in check & decide what I will wear contingent upon the spaces my feet will touch. The city, its skies, the trees, all unfold before me, but the trouble is walking by unnoticed, unfazed. I want to move unhindered, I want to slip into the beat of the city. But my body is inconvenient: it stands out, declaring itself an outsider. Loving streets is hard when they do not contain you so easily, when stepping into them means stepping out of proscribed boundaries.

Interview : Sharanya Manivannan

By Gunjan Wadhwa

First off, we would love for you to explain your idea of love to us and our readers.

All my writing, all my theory and all my practice, on love springs from loneliness. In the absence of love, I developed a theory of the same. A holistic theory of love must necessary be formed from a lived practice. By love I mean all forms: from the erotic-romantic to the familial to the spiritual and the environmental. Because love is an intangible, and is often most vividly described synecdochally rather than completely, I’ll try to explain my idea (or ideas) of and on love as we keep talking…

Do you think love is political? What do you think are the politics of love, who you love and how you love?

5 ½ Tits

By Srividya Srinivasan

The storm was raging outside. The rain lashing wickedly against the window pane, while the wind shrieked and rattled the old glass. Yet, the silence inside the small room was palpable, oppressive in its tension, almost like a rubber band about to snap. The three women sat there by the flickering light of the naked bulb, each acutely conscious of the other’s presence, longing to be free of the heavy, claustrophobic sense of sisterhood that supposedly held them bound. Each, very unlike the other.

The baby slept on.

Still from Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene, 2011