“Who (In the Underbelly of a Day on Grass Hill)" and What Sex Does

"And Dreaming," 2015, oil on canvas Jennifer Packer

Many poems have considered the experience of the female sexual role, but Bella Lobue’s poem, “Who (In the Underbelly of a Day on Grass Hill,)” (Published in Glass, August 27th, 2025) is different.

Mysteriously big  and subversive.

In it we see sex as a producer of artifice and distance. We see our body respond to the movements of nature as well as sexual movement. By the pairing of these movements, the way we organize bodily experience is challenged.

The stage directions of sex are there: we take our shirt off at the beginning and at the end, the partner climaxes and we roll over. But it is not erotic.

These bookend sexual gestures are a skeleton to be filled out by images that get far away from sex. They pull on nature: a cat eating a mouse, a bee sting, pebbles denting our hands.

Those muscles hang strangely on the poem's frame, They point us towards one of the poem's patterns: a movement and then a response of pain. The pattern repeats in natural and sexual images, framing the poem's view of sex,

                    as you thrust greatness upon me

                    in early afternoon

                    so the pollen coats my throat

                    like water inside me

As primal as this sexual connection is, this rhythm of movement and response, it produces artifice and distance.

It births the inorganic textures of the poem: plaster masks, staircases to the gods, and surgical feelings.

Sex holds no potential for creating closeness. We are raw, but we are not intimately known by the poem’s “you.”

        The bee stings so close 

        to the corner of my eye

        that if I                    smile

        the venom spreads

        squeezed to the corners of my

        mothball mouth

        and the plaster mask of my vaselined face

        is forever swelled in a grin

        with no sincerity

Not only are the thrusts and responses unable to produce intimacy, they shut off the potential of true knowing between the two actors forever, they create a plaster mask with no sincerity.

            ____________________________________________________________

Visually, the poem’s use of negative space is striking. It controlled my cadence, but irrhythmically. The spaces made me read unsteadily, I sort of swallowed those spaces, and it was a new bodily sensation. They inject energy into lines, and change the way I leave the words on one side of the space, and meet words on the other.

The poem's vision of the body is often grotesque, and always engaging. The insistence on grotesqueness makes the mysterious male figure's sexual momentum feel strange and unknown.

    

Bella Lobue's "Who (In the Underbelly of a Day on Grass Hill,)” matters because sex is on our minds, but we do not know what sex does to us.

We are caught in between the failed Tinder sex revolution and MAGA sex negativity, and there is no clear way forward.

Lobue's poem has helped me to approach these questions:

What does sex do to our understanding of the other? Does it obscure our "self" behind our role?

What does sex do to our understanding of our body?

Go read it on Glass now: https://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2025/august/lobue-who.html