The Island of Lesvos

A short story by Jeanette Winterson, The Poetics of Sex, is available on the Random House website. It is an extended poetic exploration of lesbian sexuality, written as a response to the sort of questions straights ask, but going far beyond those questions into the land of Sapphic delight. Here's an excerpt...

Hang on me my darling like rubies round my neck. Slip onto my finger like a ring. Give me your rose for my buttonhole. Let me leaf through you before I read you out loud.

Picasso warms my freezing heart on the furnace of her belly. Her belly is stoked to blazing with love of me. I have learned to feed her every day, to feed her full of fuel that I gladly find. I have unlocked the storehouses of love. On the Mainland they teach you to save for a rainy day. The truth is that love needs no saving. It is fresh or not at all. We are fresh and plentiful. She is my harvest and I am hers. She seeds me and reaps me, we fall into one another's laps. Her seas are thick with fish for my rod. I have rodded her through and through.

It's a wonderful piece of writing, very lush and sensual; it reads more like a prose-poem than a short story, but it has a narrative element.