When you hear the word "intercourse," you think of sex. But the first definition in Webster's is not about sex at all. It's this: "Communication or dealings between or among people, countries, etc.; interchange of products, services, ideas, etc." The work of San Francisco slam poet/performance artists Justin Chin and Thea Hillman is all about communication.

Malaysian-born Chin writes about communication and miscommunication between white people and brown people, rich people and poor people, people who don't have AIDS and people who do. Pissed-off brainy white "chic" Hillman writes about what is and isn't said between fathers and daughters, boyz and grrrrls, the beautiful people and the rest of us poor slobs who fantasize about them. As savvy skeptics of American consumerism, Chin and Hillman also write, ironically, about "the interchange of products and services," one of which is sex. Which brings us to the better-known definition of intercourse: "The sexual joining of two individuals; copulation."

Hillman and Chin both write about sex as exciting and scary, horrific and nasty, ecstatic and stinky, but only rarely romantic. In fact, Chin's "sexiest" writing--by which I mean erotic, expansive, stirring--isn't precisely about sex at all. Like these lines from "Bitter," the long first poem in Chin's book Bite Hard: "I have this theory: the rain each drop, big as bees, falls with a velocity to bore into the ground, tilling the grass smell out of the pockets in the earth, the pine cones and the sea smell saltiness washed clean with Absolut, this is another country, this is a different place...."

What's sexy here is the careful attention to the physical. The bigness of rain. The something that falls and bores into. The sudden smell of something sharp then salty then clean. The difference-making of the world and our perception of it that sex can precipitate. In the poem, two lovers take to a country full of beautiful "brown-skinned boys, all flashing their brightest Colgate smiles." It's a surreal landscape in which jerking off can become something as exquisite and mysterious as this: "...you rub yourself and metal shards trickle out of your pants zipper and turn rusty and I catch them in my palm before they hit the floor, the red dust etches itself into the lines of my hands...." What is it we etch into one another's hands? What color of communication, of intercourse, is this?

Thea Hillman's last book, Depending on the Light, was a collection of poems, rants, and flash fictions that began with a piece about wanting to undress and thereby communicate with the naked essence of love, and ended with a piece that declared: "If language be an orgy, then I want to fuck every word, sound, syllable. Every stolen utterance exalted. I want to do each of you, have been inside the moment of your derived, the moment of your spoken, to be able to proclaim, I know you."

The desire to tell of what the flesh has endured continues in her recent work. In the title "The Ones We Have To Hear," the poet demands the same thing that the female Confessionals of the '60s, the free-verse feminists of the '70s, the lesbian separatists of the '80s, and the abuse survivors of the '90s did of readers: that we bear witness to the poet's story. After being told that she is "lucky" she has not been raped, the first-person narrator of this poem goes on to tell about other times, when she was not so "lucky." Gradually, the words "luck" and "lucky" become ominous, and force us to realize how little "luck" and how much a generally violent social environment have to do with sexual predation.

"Finding the Girl" uses a kind of "House that Jack Built" development and repetition to create a sense of how repeated and ongoing sexual violence is against women in our society: "There are different girls/ There are different girls with similar stories/There are different girls with similar stories that always end the same way the girl disappears."

Chin and Hillman, who have toured extensively on the slam scene, write and perform to communicate--that is, to encourage our intellectual and verbal intercourse with people mainstream culture might not hear about otherwise.

Justin Chin and Thea Hillman are currently on tour with fellow San Franciscan and Manic D Press author Beth Lisick, in what is being billed as a literary ménage à trois. They appear together on Thurs Nov 1 in Queer Open Mic at the Wildrose; Mon Nov 5 at Hugo House; and Tues Nov 6 at Re-bar.