And there you have it, just a taste of the Dirty Poetry yet to come.

Stay with me for all the rest of this episode of Dirty Poetry, using

the word poetry very loosely.

Our first story is about a group of old

friends who have known each other for years and years. They've

traveled together and had adventures and have been a part of each

others lives for a long time. They know each other well. They have

for a long time, had a monthly card game. Everything was always

friendly and normal... until tonight... when things got strange.

Let's take a listen.

That was Heads-Up Poker. Written by

Susan Di Placido. Ms Di Placido is a prolific author. She has, to

date, published ten novels and one collection of short stories. Her

stories almost always involve gambling and card playing and many of

them are set in Las Vegas. But regardless of the setting, Ms Di

Placido always manages to work in a lot of steamy spicy sex scenes.

Her work has been recognized and awarded in the literary world. Her

short story, “I, Candy” won the Spirit Award at the 2005 Moon

Dance International Film Festival. Her short story collection,

American Cool won the bronze medal in the 2008 IPPY Awards and it was

a finalist for the 2008 Indie Book Awards. Her novel Shuffle Up and

Deal was nominated for the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for

Best Erotic Fiction in 2010. Susan Di Placido’s work has been

published in many places. Among them, Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth

Book Of Best New Erotica in both volume six and volume seven, Zane's

Caramel Flava, Run Devil Run, Slow Trains Literary Review, Rebellion:

New Voices Of Fiction, Clean Sheets and Susie Bright’s Best

American Erotica 2007, which is where we found our story, Heads-Up

Poker.

Let's take a moment and address the

elephant in the room. Okay, one of the elephants in the room. You

might notice that both of our stories in this episode of Dirty Poetry

are written by women, one of them decidedly lesbian, but both stories

are told from the perspective of heterosexual men. This kind of

gender bending perspective shift is, and always has been, common

among the authors of erotic literature. As readers and listeners,

these stories allow us to walk a mile in someone else’s panties.

And our authors also take an equally joyful turn at that switch. In

fact, part of the beauty of both erotic literature and our own erotic

imagination is, that in the privacy of our own minds, we can all

allow our imaginations, our desires and hungers, to roam freely, to

venture into places that we would never allow to happen in our real

lives. With all of our real life expressions of sexuality that are so

tender, loving, comforting, well... okay, even with the ass slapping,

hair pulling excitement that we want in our real life sexuality,

still there are places, many places that our imagination goes that we

would never allow to see the light of day. Good writers take us to

these forbidden places and bring us safely back again from the

adventures of foreign travel in exotic lands. With our own erotic

fantasies encouraged to take wing, our sexual imaginations are now

allowed to travel to places that are unlikely, improbable. Places

that stretch the boundaries of what sexuality is, and occasionally

even jump the fence into the impossible. Stories that can arouse

possibilities that we would have never imagined. But somehow they

become real for us for just a few brilliant moments in the privacy of

our own minds. It is there, in the privacy of our imagination that we

can begin to discover our own most primal sexual arousals. It is

great writers with their wild tales, with their exotic erotic...