The Language of Desire

Poetry is fundamentally queer, not just in its form, but in its core. As Sarah Creighton Keogh describes, queerness, like poetry, is about living beyond the confines of societal expectations and discovering new ways of seeing the world and yourself. It’s about autonomy, identity, and just letting yourself be.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. I came across Mary Oliver’s words, at a time when I was still asking my Mam if my shirt made me look ‘too gay’ before I left the house. Oliver’s testament felt like a shake on the shoulders, urging my younger self for permission to be in my body, to let myself want, without shame.

I didn’t know what intimacy was supposed to look like, but like most my age, I knew how it felt to be curious. Poetry offered itself as a way to explore that without the awkwardness or shame imposed by a school system and a reality that never offered a realistic or healthy depiction of sex, never mind queer sex. There was no roadmap, no visible guide.

The lack of maps and rules became especially significant when grappling with the stereotypes around queer women; looking at someone across a classroom for too long would mean being labelled a lesbian and therefore a danger. The label of ‘predatory’ looms and silences exploration before it can begin. It forces queer women into a box where they must guard their intentions and stifle their own questions about sex and intimacy.

How do you explore desire when it’s automatically seen as a threat? Where does that leave room for the natural curiosity that everyone is entitled to?

As I began to read more queer poets, Adrienne Rich, Carol Ann Duffy, Seán Hewitt, I found a new language of my own to express queer sex not just as an act, but as a reclamation of self. Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems wasn’t just about desire; it was about making space for queer love. Duffy’s poems, like ‘Anne Hathaway’, reclaimed historical figures, rewriting their stories with a sensuality that broke free from heteronormative expectations. And Seán Hewitt’s work, notably his memoir All Down Darkness Wide, spoke about queer love with a tenderness, refusing to subdue the softness of his experiences.

Here, poetry offered a kind of refuge. It softened the edges. Poetry creates a space where queer desire can be nuanced, playful, even vulnerable. There’s a freedom in metaphor that can diffuse the harshness of stereotypes, allowing us to ask questions, to explore sexuality without the fear of being perceived and understood. Poetry doesn’t require you to say everything clearly or perfectly—it’s a place where you can be indirect, where you can let the words bend around truths that feel indescribable. This is especially important when it comes to queer sex, which has historically been ignored, shamed, or fetishised.

At first, I resisted the flowery metaphors that saturated traditional love poems, rolling my eyes at yet another comparison of women to flowers or fruit. But over time, I began to appreciate those images as a way to express queer desire in a world where direct language could be dangerous. What once seemed cliché became a wink and a nudge under the table. Lips as petals, bodies as ripening fruit—it wasn’t just about prettiness, it was about intimacy beyond the constraints of gendered norms. It was about reshaping nature’s language to reflect the freedom of queer love, of loving outside the binary.

For me, writing poetry about my own queerness, especially queer sex, felt like an act of resistance. It wasn’t just about exploring desire, but about reclaiming the narratives. There’s something incredibly freeing in taking the language we’ve been given—whether it’s flowery metaphors or obvious erotic descriptions—and reshaping it to reflect queer experiences. It’s about saying: This is my story. This is my body. This is my love.

Queer poetry doesn’t just give us space to write about love and sex, it also allows us to break down the shame that so often surrounds it. In the words of poet Danez Smith, “blessed ground to think gay & mean we.” Through poetry, I’ve found a way to affirm my queer desire, a way to speak truths that transcend the limits of language. Lines like these give shape to the indescribable. Poetry is the affirmation of queer desire. Poetry doesn’t just make expression possible—it makes celebration possible.