Anisa Varasteh

Issue Eleven: The kind of truth that turns you on. Many people say they want intimacy. Few are prepared for the honesty it demands. Because honesty, the real kind, doesn’t live in words. It lives in the body. In the moment your breath changes. In the way your shoulders tighten when something doesn’t feel right— even if your mouth is still smiling. We grow up thinking honesty means confession: the courage to speak, to admit, to tell. But erotic honesty isn’t about confession. It’s about...

Issue Ten: Pleasure is not accidental. It’s intentional He kneels before me, a rosary slipping through his fingers.  I tell him to speak — but only of sin. Not religious sin. Erotic sin. Every time he’s disobeyed the one command I gave him: “Fantasise about anyone. Anyone but me.” This is not a confession in the religious sense, but one crafted—intentional, embodied. It’s not punishment. It’s design. A ritual of consent, power, and attention. An agreement between two people who understand...

Issue Nine: The most human truths live in contradictions. I feel things intensely—joy, grief, desire, despair—and I am not afraid of depth. I write poems that taste like longing. I love with my whole being. I dance until time dissolves. And I’ve never once regretted it. But I learnt early in my career—especially as a twenty-something woman in a professional space—that intensity has a place, and it isn’t here. That to be taken seriously, you must silence the parts of yourself that sing. That...