Baby Asleep

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter B:

baby asleep—

my tongue

licks your wet nipple

There’s a place in haiku for the erotic, and this poem found its place in an erotic haiku anthology. I wrote it on 19 March 1992 in South San Francisco, California, revising it on 28 May 1992 in Foster City, California, and further on 26 August 1994 in response to a suggestion from Dorothy Howard, who first published the poem in Raw Nervz Haiku in the autumn of 1994. Previously, the poem had said “her husband’s tongue / licks her wet nipple,” but I was grateful for the suggestion that did away with the unlikely third-person or omniscient viewpoint (both best avoided in haiku) and made the poem more immediate and personal. I suppose I first employed a more distant viewpoint because I didn’t want to own this as my experience—or at least an imagined experience (which was closer to the truth, since I did not get married until 2001).

Before publication in Raw Nervz, from 1992 to 1994 this poem was returned by Bare Bones, Modern Haiku, and Northwest Literary Forum. Was the poem not good enough for their pages, or were they shying away from an erotic subject? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I later submitted “baby asleep” for an erotic haiku anthology edited by Hiroaki Sato, without success (he published other poems of mine instead), but then Tad Wojnicki requested the poem for Sucking Mangoes Naked, an erotic haiku anthology he published with Writers & Lovers Studio in 2022. For other erotic haiku I’ve written, see “Dew on a Rose” (which begins with this poem) and “Sleeping Over,” see “Tango” on my Rengay website, and check out my introduction (with a French translation) to Your Hands Discover Me, a steamy book of tanka by Claudia Coutu Radmore.

—18 May 2025 (previously unpublished)