Where Lesbians Come From -- Jan Sellers

Guest poem sent in by Aseem

(Poem #1933) Where Lesbians Come From It is true that lesbians do not have families; we have pretend family relationships. We do not have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters; our sons and daughters do not count at all, having no families within which to rear them. And our lovers - there's nothing in that but something mocking truth; for you know it's true that lesbians do not have families, like you... We emerge, instead, complete from some dark shell, beds and beds of us (like oysters, what else would I mean?) sea-born on stormy nights with the wind in a certain quarter. We rise and wiggle, all slippery and secret, curling and stretching and glad to be alive, untangling our hair from the wind and salt and seaweed. We steal clothes from washing lines, and once it's daylight, almost pass for human. Glowing into warmth in the sun or a hard north wind we lick the salt from our lips, for now. And smile. We live for a while, in the light, despite your brutal laws and your wish that we were not here; we return to our beds by moonlight to nurture and foster the sweet salt shells that give birth to our lesbian futures. And there we plot, in our dark sea beds, the seduction of your daughters. -- Jan Sellers

A marvellous poem. The mocking tone is done just right - funny enough to
make you laugh at the absurdity of it, indignant enough to make you realise
that it's not perhaps quite that absurd. The truth pushed just far enough to
make it satire. The poem works because underlying its ridiculous narration
is a deep sense of alienation, of feeling unwanted and other in a world
where choosing to live out your sexual preferences makes you sub-human. Plus
there's the deeply erotic oyster / salt imagery, of course.

I know practically nothing about Jan Sellers. The Virago New Poets (Virago
Press, 1993, edited by Melanie Silgardo and Janet Book) from which this poem
is taken describes her as a "part-time adult education worker, full-time
lesbian and intermittent performance poet".

Aseem