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New
Moon
17 Apr 2026
Kate
Vanhinsbergh
Brief Visit to a
Barcelona Sex Castle
After Zaffar Kunial’s
Foxglove Country
Only once did I think
of the word orgy,
the fat, gluttonous o
opening a pathway
to the two syllables of a miracle
or a spell, it’s hard to say –
this whole castle clings
to the glottal step of the gy,
the glassy-eyed fantasy
of fucking some sugar junkie,
bypassing the decision of the or,
the question of the origin,
gazing down into the orb
of blown glass to read the stories
forming on its surface –
and, disappearing back
into the bliss of the o,
the mouth of the rose,
to decipher the impossible flora
shivering somewhere further in,
closer to the interior rg,
near the growing urge of the orgasm,
the more sophisticated cousin
of the orgy.
Behind the poem...
The playful nature of Zaffar Kunial’s poem Foxglove Country gave me permission to be abstract as I liked in mine. His dismantling of the word ’foxgloves‘; his exploration of its component parts; his description of the ‘xgl’ in the middle of the word as ‘a small tangle, a witch’s thimble, hard-to-toll bell, elvish door to a door’. I felt compelled to pick up my notebook and start writing. Finally, I had a way to write about a strange experience I’d had in Barcelona – albeit elusively.