"Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away"

Audre Lorde’s words resound with a deep yearning for presence, intimacy, and protection. The plea to “attend me” is a call to be seen wholly, beyond the superficial layers, a request for attentive, wholehearted engagement from another. There is a vulnerable openness embedded in the invitation to “hold me in your muscular flowering arms,” where sensuality and strength intertwine. “Muscular” conjures images of power and support, while “flowering” evokes beauty, vulnerability, and growth. The fusion of these qualities suggests a longing for a love that is both robust and tender, capable of embracing complexities and contradictions within relationships and within the self.

The phrase “protect me from throwing any part of myself away” reveals an acute awareness of internal fragmentation, the pressures to suppress or sacrifice integral pieces of one’s identity for acceptance, survival, or love. Lorde’s request is not simply for shelter from external harm, but for an ally who can guard against self-erasure, the subtle and sometimes invisible ways we discard parts of ourselves when they are deemed undesirable, inconvenient, or unsafe in the eyes of the world. It’s an acknowledgment of the losses experienced by those living at the margins, the exhaustion of constant self-negotiation, and the preciousness of wholeness.

Within these lines, there is both strength and fragility. The speaker seeks more than comfort, they desire an act of resistance against the forces that encourage self-abandonment. To be “attended to” and “held” is not only physical closeness, but emotional affirmation, a commitment to mutual caretaking and radical acceptance. Lorde weaves together urgency and gentleness, demanding a relationship where selfhood is not only preserved but celebrated, shielded from the world’s demand for conformity and from the self’s temptation toward diminishment. Through intimacy and care, Lorde points to the possibility of becoming more fully oneself, enfolded in the supportive embrace of another.