On Intimacy
Thematically, the submissions explore various aspects of intimacy — sexuality, family, friendship; appreciation, euphoria, grief, disgust. We are touched by how intensely and openly these themes are addressed in the poems, and also by how socially relevant each individual contribution is. A thousand thanks to everyone who shared their text with us and submitted their work.
You’ll also find a selection of paintings by Owen Brown who beautifully captured different forms of intimacy. Owen was born in Chicago, trained as a pianist, took his first art class at 23, and “all he’s wanted to do since then has been paint.”
He holds degrees from Yale, the University of Chicago, and studied at CCA. Once a San Francisco resident, he lives in Minneapolis. He exhibits widely. His works are in collections in the United States and abroad.
If you want to get to know him, he’ll be exhibiting some of his works in Berlin at Galerie Kaffee Kunst Genuss from 05.04.25 - 27.04.25.
The subject of Intimacy captivated us due to its multi-faceted nature for a while now. That's why we decided to launch our first open call alongside our regular submissions and publish it on the International Day of Poetry and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – March 21. To hear from diverse international voices, we chose to focus on English-language poetry this time. With the help of the Heidelberg Cultural Office, our call reached all 52 UNESCO Cities of Literature, and we were thrilled by the numerous submissions from authors around the globe.
jellyfish experience
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Struggling through late stage capitalism and environmental collapse the best I can. Walker, reader, poet, admirer of beauty in flowers and sewage treatment works (because humans are messy and complex). London is home but the playground is currently expanding and the Chao Phraya is where my window now looks.
for H.D.
I was always scared of jellyfish
the way they move like they’re not animals not beings but plastic bags full of air blowing in the wind
although there was no wind in the hot Mediterranean air
and my cousins picked them up
smooth side down and threw them at me shrieking
and one landed
SLAP
on my shoulder
leaving red marks where its tentacles contacted
and my mum told someone to pee on me and they really did and then I smelt of a strange man’s pee
but a jellyfish experience does not refer to the blown up Tesco bags
nor to the tentacle scars still reminding me of the shame of smelling like urine
it is when everything fits so neatly together
everything collides
and you are covered by a smooth sticky film
and nothing else matters
not trump bolsonaro erdogan men capitalism instagram earthquakes logging gentrification rape shame depression
I had a jellyfish experience with you
on the top of the hill at full moon
I touched your back and you said you felt electricity
this made the sparks jump onto my fingers and we both laughed and rippled with the shocks
we wrote messages to the moon on tissue and burnt them holding hands
we lay on your t shirt and the jellyfish
– smooth side up –
enclosed us and its tentacles tickled the moon the stars the rough grass poking our backs through the thin cotton
we bounced down the hill still safe inside our protection
and then I recognised a familiar smell
and saw your wet crotch
and then my own
our collective urine made the experience complete
Your Body is A Dancer
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Ade Ajayi (*1998) works in research on migration and discrimination. He is currently studying for a master's degree in social sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His writing deals with queerness, diaspora, questions of identity and kinship and sometimes more or less radical intimacy in the context of precarious life realities. He writes in English and German and is one of the winners of the Open Mike 2024.
We lie there, phosphorous
in a night of many
nightingale
the windows ajar
the inner lining of
your palm scents of
a rotten metal
in a blue that is
exhausting itself
our torsos
in an algebraic embrace
in a riddle we could never
solve
we ask the moon
to bury witness
My body is a poem under revision
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I wrote my first poems in English during a year abroad in America and then didn't write any more for a good twenty years. In this respect, I feel a need to catch up, which I’m currently fulfilling primarily on Instagram. I work as a lawyer and management consultant specializing in data protection and IT law, so writing poetry and short prose is my important counterpoint to the always functional legal language.
There’s a hair growing on my vulva
white and strong it must have
escaped the hot wax. I try
to pluck it out and decide against it. Right away
my body remembers the tickling
sensation, deeply satisfying in its pain.
While I’m at it I once again wonder why
my pussy lips are fully covered almost as if
they hid inside a closed blossom. Or am I mistaken?
Has it always been that way? Time does strange things.
You’re not doing this for me are you? I hear
my lover say with an alarmed expression
on their face. What if? But fret not. My body
is a poem under revision, it revises itself.
Once in a while I get it out, I look gently
at the lines that changed. Someone should’ve
told me though: there are so many
bodies in one. Someone
should’ve told me: there is so much
pleasure in an old body.
Woven
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My work often interweaves themes of identity, feminism, humanity, environmentalism, philosophy, and trauma; however, I believe that my writing centralises around the power of experience and its meanings.
What is it like—
to know my mind more intimately than i do?
Because it was you who stitched the seams of my reality
You who wove thread through me
when I was young and
your thumb could press ever so gently on the impressionable essence of my being
supple and awaiting the pins and needles you’d be placing.
Arching
the
tip
to
penetrate—pierce—split—tear seams apart —
You created me; the tapestry
from which
I see myself between the slits of your perception.
You know where my frayed edges will catch
and how they will unravel me
because you left all of the loose threads. . . . to catch and peel a strand of hair back
from my temple,
kind and
considerate.
prodigal daughters
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Debbie’s life revolves around languages: after getting her M.A. in English Studies in Heidelberg, she has been working as a translator while her free time is spent reading, writing poetry and prose, and exploring creativity in any way she can. She likes to write about all different iterations of love, about being queer, about remembrance and about home.
i help my best friend move out of the house she grew up in.
i hold her hand as we sit between
long
long
long forgotten soda stains on a polyester carpet
sticky palms from sticky copper coins we found lodged behind a sticky dresser
i tap morse code on the inside of her forearm telling her i hate hate hate that we’re growing older but you’re here to do it with me you’re still here to do it with me do you remember
do you remember us as kids not scared of dying yet only vaguely worried we hadn’t really lived and you were there and i was there
and i’m afraid that’s going to matter until the end of time we mattered so much we matter –
pause.
we wrap up our childhood in paisley patterned paper and balance it on a box of tacky blue ceramic tiles on the way to the landfill. where to carry it? where to carry it? we hold youth in our mouths and it tastes like
lukewarm peach iced tea and it sounds like
your parents’ landline ringing and it feels like
dewy wet backyard trampolines
i hold my best friend’s hand at the kitchen table.
we touch
carrot cake crumbs
on a
chilly cracked cedar countertop
we touch
love split in two
pried open
stuck into the tile joints
i hold my best friend’s hand in an empty bedroom and the window glass is covered in devotion shaped like syrupy fingerprints.
she taps morse code on the inside of my forearm telling me you know somewhere out there this house endures it wraps around every version of us we are playing hopscotch in the driveway and will be for all of time
i help my best friend move out of the house she grew up in.
and i stay.
and her nails dig into my palm.
and they spell out i choose you i choose you i choose
you
this house will collapse knowing all this time ago i chose you
Squared
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Eglė Elena Murauskaitė is a Lithuanian art writer, poet, and translator. Her works interweave the themes of queer body, nature, and the sacred, drawing on indigenous poetry of the various nations she had lived with, as well as intuitive movement and sound practices she leads. With a background in international security and fourteen years as a military consultant, Murauskaitė explores creative writing as a way of giving an equivalent voice to the shared underlying experiences of inhabiting the self, de-othering and integrating the increasingly fractured surroundings.
The two most important square meters in life –
I wanted them to be
Inside my skin –
That crimson liquidity…
Or in a loving embrace,
Less square and more round,
Perhaps more like me.
I wanted them
Near a fireplace, perhaps,
Pictures framing the walls
A place to take root
In due time
To dig up a small square of a pit
For the hound that has passed
And a cranberry bush yet to come.
But that would be choice and creation.
The two most important square men
Chose to make me instead.
One – on the slope between blocks of apartments
Between a school and my home.
I only remember that I don’t recall,
My body showing what wording cannot.
The other – between square blocks of granite,
Between mourning lilies and funeral firs.
Other princesses share their memories
How they asked them to dance:
Elementary school, graduation, a wedding…
While my memory cannot but fail
To fathom
How surely one chose me –
The other did not.
Blessings from Ishtar
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Kholoud Charaf, born in 1981 in southern Syria, is a Syrian poet, novelist, and human rights activist who has been living in exile since 2018. She first studied medical technology and later pursued a degree in Arabic literature at the University of Damascus. Charaf has been awarded multiple international fellowships as a guest writer, including residencies in Poland, Latvia, Sweden, and Germany. She also received an IIE America Fellowship and, in 2023, a two-year Writers-in-Exile Fellowship in Vienna, sponsored by the IG Authors and the City of Vienna. Her poetry has been translated into more than ten languages. In 2019, she was honored with the prestigious Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature from the Arabic Center for Geographic Literature (Abu Dhabi) for her autobiographical book The Return to the Mountains: A Diary in the Shadow of War. Her latest novel, Diaries I Have Nothing to Do with, was shortlisted for the 2024 Arabic Booker Prize. With All My Faces is her first book to be translated into German (translated from Arabic by Kerstin Wilsch).
My creation, Kanatha –
Bathe your feet in light
And come
Lay your braids on a loom-woven pillow
Let your lips enfold the grape
Intoxicating you
When the harvest is done.
Do not kiss the moon
That moves over your slumbering cheek
And don’t forget fresh hay for the goat
So she won’t forget the milk
O bare branches,
There is a skilful thief
Upon the swelling buds
Your first desire
Poured forth water –
A sacrifice craved by the God of Love
You were always like me
Tenderness lying on marble
So, sleep in peace
And as soon as the God of War sleeps, I will wake you
Don’t forget how you were, in front of the mirror
Naked
Stumbling over your own beauty
I am afraid for you, of your own hand
Revealing your landscape in flames
I will not let the dream stranger knock at your gate
And so, sleep, Kanatha
Perhaps, one day, you will wake up wine-soaked
And I will tell you
What these sacrifices have done.
A new dawn is creeping
From your mirror
Don’t lose
Your sacred face
Biscuit Bitch/Glucose Guardian/Gurk
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Klaudia Rzeźniczak, born in Łódź, grew up in Hamburg, lives in Heidelberg. She studies Media Arts and Film, works at a theatre, writes and is politically active.
She enters my space
and offers me an orange half
I tell her to peel it better
as I don't like the white stuff
- a customer service complaint, she mocks
Frantically I laugh
I pee myself
and ask her to accompany me to the bathroom where we plan the
matchmaking
(we'd make them will slip on a banana peel and into each other’s arms)
and the wedding of our children
(the party will be silverfish themed)
making us a family, officially
Two wicked grandmas
with 20 avocado seedlings and
a shelf full of spice and tea
She wants to paint me like Maria but compares me to the vengeful firelord Azula
and her brother Zuko
who looks for his honour in wrong places
I have been executed thrice
Each time a photo taken beforehand
She hugs me from the side koala-like
when I roll up my turtleneck up to my eyes
about to be hanged
Meanwhile her boyfriend takes a picture of us,
jealous of my time.
She enters my space
and teaches me not to invade hers
mother medusa
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Lahraeb Munir is a poet based in Nottingham, UK. Their first chapbook concave in a convex heart was published by Alexander & Brook in 2017. Their second, un;oaded was published by Bookleaf Publishing in 2023. Their work focuses on the exploration of the self, in both mind and body. When not writing poems, they can be found reading, spending time in nature, and with friends.
my mother body checks me,
or sometimes gets my sister to
— looking for new scars, new flesh, something to convince us all that this is no punishment,
i
am statuesque. no colour & grotesque. i am art, i tell myself. i am worthy to be looked at, especially this way. this is love. this is love. this is —
trained eyes on the floor, always the floor. medusa couldn’t get me if i was the only person left in the world
or she would say
oh, this one has already been saved. my mother does not sit until the ritual is done & her penance paid. i dare to
breathe & this starts the chant. i brought this upon myself, upon myself, upon myself. i am an
exhibition. a caged animal in the zoo. a circus freak. fun to look at
but not to be. this is love. this is love. this is —
being told to look at her & not being able to move. ah, medusa got me after all, so much hardness in her gaze —
this is what it means, what it means
to be saved.
i am dismissed & can breathe again. sometimes i see a scarf as a snake, writhing down from the scalp, twisted round the neck, tight. i
remember the first time i did that, waiting for my own venom to take me down. to spit through this body, to make me holy again, i was
perseus, new-aged & the first to be slain this time. i was
a child turned into stone from the inside. i taste
the blood & out comes the coral
of the red sea, hissing through
the gullet. the head twists but there’s no decapitation. there will be
more tries later. in time,
i cut off my hair for fear of snakes. i avoid all mirrors in case my eyes do the same. i make new flesh & don’t know how much i weigh. i hiss out poison & wash it away. i don’t tell anyone until it’s too late.
& this is love.
& this is love.
& this is love.
Lights out
-
Laura Evans was born in the north of England and grew up in the Midlands. As an author and poet, she is drawn to characters and settings that aren’t quite as they seem – places with an edge of the uncanny, or people trying to find their space in the world – as well as stories that centre on the female experience and women’s evolving self-identities, particularly regarding motherhood. Her first novel, a literary story of obsessive queer love and witchcraft set in 1930s Suffolk, is scheduled for publication in 2026.
She sleeps like a photograph:
on her back, mouth open, arms
thrown up beside her head. It’s
where she fell, hurling herself
at sleep, sleep having no choice
but to catch her. You cannot
fear bears and sleep like that. You
cannot fear a world with teeth.
Her brother has burrowed a
chamber, long as a boy and sour
with biscuit breath. He dreams
of interplanetary travel, orbits vast
enough to melt a human mind.
He calls to me sometimes, less
than he did. He’s busy now:
learning from the monsters when
to run, when to cover his eyes.
Meanwhile I, professionally
afraid, sleep like a skittish
child at the tide’s tongue: squinting,
jumping back before the wave
breaks on the dark sand. While my
dolphin children, too far out,
send back to me impatient
clicks: come on, come on, come on.
how to make a bed feel like home
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Laura Lynn Meyer (she/her) is a writer and poet from Hamburg, Germany. To me words are the stones and my voice is the slingshot on the minefield of woman*hood, that’s why all my poems intent to cover intimacy from a feminist point of view, depicting women* in their multifaceted ways.
masturbate to a corny tumblr video
of women loving women
because men seem gross to you
eat sandwiches in it
swipe the crumbs from the sheets
and still end up being tickled by a teeny tiny bit of bread crust by night
drink a cup of tea in it
spill a bit of the tea
mark your territory
bring a real good book
doomscroll instead of reading it
then end up devouring every page of it
falling asleep whilst the bedside lamp is still on
the book as your sleep companion
let the warmth of the sun wake you up in it
get drunk and try to drift in a dizzy sleep in it
have a hangover
cure the hangover
by watching your favourite series in it
„tell jesus, the b*** is back“
as an initiation rite to your holy sheets
have an orgasm in it again
find your rhythm
love yourself in it
allow yourself to not love every day in it
let yourself cry out loud
press your face against the linen of your pillow
simply the most intimate version of yourself
let your bed see what nobody else will.
all your dark nights and good mornings
and everything that comes inbetween.
Katrin
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Magdaléna Stárková was born in Ostrava, grew up in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and has lived as a freelance author and translator in Bremen in northern Germany since 2014. She is a graduate of Polish and English philology and Jewish studies at the Palacký University in Olomouc and Jewish Studies at the Central European University in Budapest.
Stárková worked as a literary translator for PLAV, the monthly magazine for world literature (including texts by Cynthia Ozick, Karin Fellner and Rachel Korn). She published in the Czech literary periodicals Host, Kulturní noviny, Lžička v šuplíku, Herberk and H_aluze and, together with Marek Epstein, Viola Fischerová, Josef Moník, Petra Soukupová and others, in the anthologies Moře a pláž (Listen, 2012) and O lidech a psech, Prague (Listen, 2013). Poems in Italian by Magdaléna Stárková have been published on the cultural blog Alza La Mano Adesso!
In the Czech Republic, Magdaléna Stárková's independent publications include a collection of short stories entitled Modré okenice, Prague (Motto, 2015), and the two volumes of poetry Povyjan, (ARSCI, 2012), and Modře a měkce, (ARSCI, 2013), both with illustrations by Marie Krappmann.
The first German-language publication of Magdaléna Stárková's poems was in 2018 in the literary journal Sinn und Form: Die Nacht verteilt. Poems, in: Sinn und Form 1 (2018). Her first volume of poetry in German was published by Sujet Verlag (Bremen) under the name Mein nächstes erstes Wort (2020).
you are the last breath
of that little bird
drowned in your garden
you fear your body is too old
to give to a man
yet you offer your skin
to cold waters of the spring lake
and fish out three wilted red roses
the three fucking red roses
no woman cares for
you say: I am sorry for your generation
we had the pill
but didn’t have AIDS
and when you flutter
like that poor tired chickadee
so many years ago
and want to lay down with infinity
I open the window
to let your soul out
Vision test
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Margaret King’s recent work has appeared in Ice Floe Press, Memoir Mixtapes, Petrichor, and Bone Parade. She teaches tai chi in Wisconsin, USA. She is also the author of the poetry collection, Isthmus.
I once dated a nearsighted girl
whose eyes looked perpetually unfocused
even at close range, unless
she was staring back into mine,
our noses pressed together,
her signature sign of affection.
Her desire descended on me
like a party of sandhill cranes in Nebraska
A thunderous riot in full fall migration,
making their prehistoric, singular jazz trumpet calls.
And while I am ashamed now to say
that I could have tamed these idiotically-fearless birds,
befriended them year after year, bathed in their magic,
let their dragon wings beat against me with the utmost tenderness,
I, an inglorious Gilded Age hunter, harvested more of them than I could carry
fluffing my pillow, my featherbed, my hat with their foolish, endearing innocence.
I built a shrine to her love, it took years, decades,
a grotto illustrating what I did and did not return,
but desire doesn’t live in stone caves.
it flew to some safer, warmer, far-off place
and only then could I see it clearly:
the cavernous space of my jeweled cave
was nothing but a blank space,
an empty picture frame
where a photo of us,
both wearing glasses,
should have been.
how does it fare,
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Mislav was born in a little stuffy town in rural Croatia before moving on to study Comparative Literature, English Studies and Film and Media Studies in Zagreb and Copenhagen. Now working enthusiastically and precariously in Berlin, Mislav writes, teaches, translates, edits, organizes writing and movement workshops and classes, gets inspired by queerness in all facets, makes magick and occasionally ponders if getting a PhD would be worth it. You can find Mislav near bodies of water, in parks, cafes and clubs, lost in thought or music, in love and, most often, in August.
your incendiary clasp on my wrist after hours of resting on a teacup? you mention that language is but a mere sensation but
how so exactly? my ass cheeks are stiff from straddling the limestone aqueduct replica for what feels like forever. i haven’t seen you in what feels like forever, and i don’t think i see you
as we speak – or, at least you do. precisely, the contours of what seem like nose eyes and mouth keep shifting, bathed in rays that emanate from large lightbulbs, with a sense of direction but no points to pin-point, a screensaver
of eternally generating pipelines only seemingly randomized to fill up the void but governed by rows of ones and exes and ohs. forever
is a word we’d say often. forever’s what floated above the minutia of fresh bread and churchgoing in the bomb-kissed cataracts of our hometown. you’ll be here forever, a fourteen-year-old honest-to-god conviction but also a battered-down phrase turned curse turned life sentence. forever’s a guarantee of what came
to go. the promises held, the missives of habits, fixations we held without touching each other in ways that we wanted to
be touched. i haven’t seen you since then and you’ve grown buff and muscular, your kaleidoscope face perched upon shoulders too broad to embrace, lacking proportion and grace of a memory murmured through fresh pillowcases into memory foam every night since. your long fingers i once ago sucked semi-jokingly
rest as firm on your lap as my slightly dormant erection under the table top. i never believed a tongue’s a sensation and i don’t think you’d either. if so, would you speak now
in sheer understatements, sat feet apart across me too formal, legs spread and chest propped in a false stance of dominance? your daughter’s asleep in the pram and i keep wondering if she’d comprehend love
as we knew it – taciturn, sneaked-in, never showed-off, paused when your brother twists keys of the flat, paused when a group of children walk past, paused upon hearing the echoing clack of a nun’s
mary janes down the nave, a sacrosanct alleyway love. you don’t have to speak just
be touched. it’s you and me, and the minutia, the lingering afternoon lights.
jupiter
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Yohan Holtkamp is a poet and performance artists from Cologne (Germany), where he studies literary writing at the Academy of Media Arts. His works deal with themes of transness, natural science and psychedelia. His poems have been published in several anthologies.