Content note: This article discusses misogyny, sexual harassment and grooming.

“Does pussy really taste like sun-dried tomatoes?” P asks as we file out of Poetry Workshop II. It is 2015, and my poem, ‘Pussy Tastes Like Sun-Dried Tomatoes’, has just survived its first public dissection. The poem follows a 19-year-old boy’s affair with a married spiritual adviser, folding sex and religion into something grotesque and ridiculous. At one point, it goes:

But the best part, he says, is how her pussy tastes like sun-dried tomatoes. Can you believe it? And now he’s telling everyone that pussy tastes like sun-dried tomatoes. Hell, no. Pussy tastes like cotton candy. Or peanut butter. Or chicken barbecue. (41)

A few classmates laughed. Others looked offended that they were expected to take something so unserious seriously. One guy (a political science major) was visibly disgusted by the title alone. Normally, I would have spent the rest of the day replaying every reaction in my head. Instead, I felt almost high. My skin was on fire. I felt divine.

The erotic as the nucleus of my poetry

I spent the rest of my time at university chasing that fire through erotic poems. In college, I encountered J. Neil C. Garcia’s ‘Safer Sex Blues’ for the first time. I had never read a poem quite like it. Garcia wrote about oral sex without looking away from the queasiness and awkwardness that came with desire: “and shyly lick / cum off / the inside / of his thigh.” Yet the poem was also so tender and funny and hot. I sought out Garcia’s other books, and eventually read everything of his I could find.

Sharon Olds’s ‘Sex Without Love’ and Eileen Myles’s ‘Peanut Butter’ were other poems that rewired something in me. I loved that these poems weren’t embarrassed by desire; they revelled in it. They wore their wanting openly, almost defiantly.

Their fearlessness was infectious. Soon, I was writing poems that indulged my own unruly desires. I wrote about absurd hookups with Filipino celebrities and cartoon characters and fever dreams starring bunnies and Teletubbies. I wrote about sex with fruits, sex with blue-haired girls, sex with things that were never supposed to be sexy. Back then, writing about sexual desire felt easy, expansive and wickedly fun.

I was born in Mandaluyong City but grew up in Laguna, a province south of Metro Manila, back when it was still undeveloped and far less crowded. We spent much of my childhood moving between small towns. There is nothing especially glamorous or remarkable about me or my family. And honestly, I had never considered that a problem until I moved back to Metro Manila for college.

At a university filled with kids who were born into obscene amounts of wealth and privilege, it was easy to feel small. In fact, they deliberately made you feel small. Four years there gave me a lifetime’s worth of class consciousness and a pretty intense class hatred. The divide felt even sharper as a woman, because it was never only about money. It was also about how you were expected to behave in classrooms and social circles, and how much ambition you were allowed to show.

No matter how hard I tried to talk, act and dress like my classmates, I never really belonged there. I had a bad mouth, no money, slept around and smoked a lot. For all the ways I felt out of place, there were two things I was sure about myself: I was a woman, and I could write.

Erotic poetry became the space where those two truths collided. For the longest time, I wondered what it was about the erotic that enchanted me and occupied so much of my poetic imagination. Of course, provocation was part of the fun. I liked making people blush, raise an eyebrow and wonder whether I had gone too far. But that thrill was only part of what kept drawing me back.

We often associate the erotic with sexual desire. But in her 1978 essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, Audre Lorde reaches for something far beyond physical pleasure: “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (Lorde, 53). For Lorde, the erotic is bound up with how deeply we are able to feel, and what those feelings reveal about the lives we want to inhabit. She calls it “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde, 54).

What Lorde describes comes closest to the feeling I had been chasing. The erotic, she suggests, is not only about what we do, but about “how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (Lorde, 54). Writing erotic poems seemed to heighten everything I felt and desired as a woman while also letting me imagine who else I could be. Erotic poetry gave me room to stretch beyond the version of myself defined by class, gender and other people’s expectations. I was not disappearing into fantasy. I was creating a larger, fuller life.

At 19, desire made me ridiculously creative and productive. I wrote constantly, almost compulsively, as if desire had given my imagination more places to go. It made everything feel charged with possibility. I did not sit down and ask whether any of it was important enough to write about. I wanted to write it, so I did.

In my poem ‘A Painted Fuck’, I wrote:

Paint dripped from their dicks, the colors of their fluids mixed like soup made of sky and cement. The sex was recreated, the best in centuries. A Painted Fuck. 69 x 69. Cum on Canvas. Still life. (13)

In another poem, ‘Sid Lucero Lost his Third Nipple and Became a Poet’, I wrote:

He was drunk and crumbling and hot as fuck. I was euphoric and crumbling and just the right kind of lost. We entered a burger joint and ordered a naughty milkshake sprinkled with Fruit Loops and old people’s nipples. (6)

At the time, I thought I was simply following whatever excited or amused me. I did not yet have a language for the way desire could generate images and whole imaginative worlds.

Lorde traces the word erotic back to eros, “the personification of love in all its aspects”, borne of chaos and associated with “creative power and harmony”. She frames the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women”, a creative energy that moves through “our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde, 55).

What interests me is how far that creative energy travels. It moves through the rest of a woman’s life, sharpening her sense of what gives her joy and what makes her feel most alive. Once she learns to recognise and trust that feeling, she becomes less willing to live in a world that diminishes her. She becomes harder to convince that her appetites are excessive or that shame and silence are simply part of being a woman.

And once that creative energy is shared, it can validate another woman’s desires and make her less ashamed of the parts of herself she has been taught to hide. That recognition does not erase differences in class, history or circumstance, but it can make those differences less alienating. It gives women another way to find one another, not only through what has hurt us, but through what gives us freedom, joy and a sense of possibility.

That matters because people who are less isolated are harder to silence. Shared joy can embolden us to speak up and refuse what we have been taught to endure alone. This makes it easier to challenge the forces that police women’s bodies, profit from their silence and shame them for their desires.

To be completely honest, when I was writing ‘A Painted Fuck’ and ‘Sid Lucero Lost his Third Nipple and Became a Poet’, I had no idea what kind of power they could hold. I just wanted to write sex the way it actually felt to me then: sometimes beautiful, other times frightening, often hilarious, and occasionally so overwhelming that absurdity was the only way I knew how to write it. I only hoped they might reach someone who would read them and think: yes, exactly.

I also had no idea that the same poems would lead me into some of the worst experiences of my twenties.