5-Dimensional Kanban Board

  Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet XLI”  is a demystified picture of women’s sexuality detached from fantasies. In hushed tones just prior to a sexual encounter, the poem attends to the strength of a woman’s sexuality, regardless of her feelings towards her partner. Refusing to fall back to an acceptable justification, such as future love or procreation, Millay rejects an optimistic or reparative meaning to her drives. The sonnet reveals that, as women are undone to be the space of man's becoming through sex, a space is created for a heterosexual and female sinthom osexuality. Intoning to her unnamed lover, Millay expresses her desire to “bear [his] body’s weight upon [her] breast,” while apologizing for the “needs and notions of [her kind]” women (Millay 601).  The reader—and indeed, the lover—may be surprised to learn that the “needs and notions” of women apparently do not include any semblance of a need “for conversation when [they] meet again,” (ibid). Millay is under no