Rage Hezekiah "Honing"

https://www.ragehezekiah.com/

Since so many of us are at home alone missing the deliciousness of touch, and because nothing is quite so exquisite and radical as an exploration of queer Black femme pleasure, and because our pleasures is so precious so invaluable. I thought I’d start with this stunner by my good friend Rage Hezekiah. 

HONING

Sprawled open, my v-wide thighs 

held the faucet hostage

awaiting the eruption I’d found 

while filling myself, 

bringing water deep 

into my own brimmed vessel 

beneath lips vast enough 

to hold a fist, no—

a body newly mine

I gave myself to this, a bath

and time alone to bloom, 

submerged in bubbles

my budded nipples piercing 

the steam-filled room. Tight

breath muffled under

thunderous rushing, the water—

thrummed relentless 

in the best way until 

I spilled over, sinking 

bicuspids into my bicep 

blossoming/breaking

into affirmation: yes this 

a new kind of wholeness

both/and

yes 

The last time I heard this poem read aloud was among family. Not my own family, thank god, but the poet’s, Rage Hezekiah author of the full length collection of poems Stray Harbor and the chapbook Unslakable. There was a long delay after Rage read the poem’s final words, which end with an emphatic and ecstatic yes.  Some of the family were still squirming in the joy filled awkwardness of what we had witnessed; of all the autoerotic sex the poem so freely celebrates. We were all old enough to know what the “yes” and the “yes this” that preceded it were referring to. How in a more performative reading those words might rightly be gasped, but still we chose to sit in our awkwardness pretending, as families will sometimes, that we didn’t recognize ourselves in the image of the speaker taking her pleasure beneath the bathtubs gushing faucet. I, at least, tried to smile at what I knew was a good poem. A poem that deserved to be celebrated. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Moments into our awkward silence, as if experiencing a delay, one of the poet’s aunts exclaimed “You are so cool,” loud enough so that we all giggled in the back cafe of the book store where we poets had been shuffled aside to do our reading; our pleasure and tension released out into the room with the auntie’s exclamation. This poem and this poet are to quote her aunt “cool.” 

What is cool about this poem, and more importantly, what is beautiful about much of Rage’s work is its use of music. In this poem which is so deeply and exquisitely about sensual pleasure, and not just pleasure but the pleasure of people assigned female at birth. Rage carries the reader from pleasure to pleasure to crescendo by way of the carefully crafted musicality of her language. From the beginning the poem uses open vowel sounds like the aw and oh sounds in the first two lines “sprawled open, my v-wide thighs/held the faucet hostage,” which invites the reader, when speaking this poem aloud, to open their mouths wider, like those “v-wide thighs,”in the opening lines, and to, by extension open themselves to pleasure as they enter further into the poem. 

“Honing” continues its musicality through its middling point which reads: 

“I gave myself to this, a bath

and time alone to bloom, 

submerging in bubbles

my budded nipples piercing

the steam filled room. Tight”

Here, the poem continues a chorus of “B” sounds which has been bubbling up through the poem from “bringing” to “brimmed” to “beneath and “body” down into four of the five lines quoted above. These bubbling “B’s”, when given attention, feels almost like a rumbling up or crescendo toward the orgasm the reader can, by now, at least hope to read at the end of the poem. It should be noted that the poet in some ways ends this crescendo of “B”’s before the orgasm with the screaming “ee” sounds in “piercing” which is enjambed or rather placed intentionally on the end of the line. That loud “ee” at the end of a line after the soft sounds of “bath” bloom” and bubbles” feels almost like an audible extension of the speakers pleasure and not just the bodies response to it.  

The imagery in “Honing” is just as gorgeous as the sound because of how fully it captures the bodies experience of pleasure in the moment of seeking and encountering orgasm. For example, look at the poets use of water here.

“breath muffled under

thunderous rushing, the water—

thrummed relentless

in the best way until 

I spilled over, sinking” 

Here the movement of water begins to act as a metaphor for the build of pleasure in the body. It is “thunderous” and “thrumm[ing] relentlessly,” these lines are effective because they can be read both literally as the water of the faucet falling with gusto. Or and more importantly they can be read as metaphor for the orgasm that “spills over” in the speaker by the end draining them so completely that she seems almost to lose her buoyancy by the end of it and as the enjambment of the line suggest start “sinking.”  

The final lines of the poem move away from strict imagery into the poems gentle thesis. An edit or re-envisioning of its title “honing” which is a word often used to describe the sharpening of a knife. Rage’s use of “Honing” though allows for a less phallic more femme centered read of the word. While the poem does end with a single word or point on a line “yes” we are meant, I think, to read this “yes” as holding in it not a single exclamation but everything that comes before. “Yes” then, is a word for “both/and” it is a word of opening of both “blossoming” and “breaking” it can’t contain only a single feeling, as no word can, and so must contain all of them and in doing so creates something new. A “wholeness” that is as inclusive as it is expansive. A “yes” I think we can all echo and loudly. “Yes” we say. “yes this.” 

Rage Hezekiah is a New England based poet and educator, who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The MacDowell Colony, and The Ragdale Foundation, and is the recipient of the Saint Botolph Foundation's Emerging Artists Award. Her poems have been anthologized, co-translated, and published internationally. Find out more and support this poet by checking out her website here.