Intimate Transmissions

|

In “Intimate Transmissions,” Georgia Shreve transforms desire into signal and static. The speaker experiences another presence not as romance from afar, but as a force moving through her body, thoughts, and daily rituals. What begins as attraction becomes a technologically charged possession narrative, equal parts erotic, comic, and unnerving. Through images of receivers, implants, and magnetic pull, the poem asks where intimacy ends and invasion begins. It is a bold portrait of modern longing as transmission: intimate, disorienting, and impossible to fully switch off.

First published:

2026

Published in

“Intimate Transmissions” is one of Shreve’s most inventive explorations of erotic psychology, recasting attachment through the vocabulary of circuitry, surveillance, and signal capture. From its opening lines, the poem refuses sentimental framing. The male presence is not idealized from distance. He is already inside the speaker’s sensorium, “coming alive” in her, “thinking for” her, and moving through her body as pulse, voltage, and command.

The poem’s central achievement is metaphorical consistency. Shreve does not use technological language as ornament. She builds an entire emotional architecture around it: “tiny receivers,” “embedded in my brow,” “benign emissions,” “magnetic force,” and the devastatingly funny “remote control.” This lexicon allows the poem to hold contradictory tones at once. It is sensuous and anxious, intimate and mechanized, playful and alarming. Desire feels both chosen and imposed.

As the poem progresses, repetition becomes structure. The recurring “Sometimes I feel him” acts as refrain and pressure wave, each return subtly altering the emotional charge. What first reads as fascination gathers undertones of dependency, then loss of control, then self-aware irony. By the final stanzas, the speaker is no longer simply describing feeling. She is diagnosing a system she cannot fully exit.

The closing movement is especially strong because Shreve scales the drama down rather than up. Instead of climaxing in declaration, the poem lands in domestic detail, toothpaste, lipstick, pillow, where obsession has infiltrated the banal. That tonal contraction gives the ending its sting. The extraordinary has become routine. Intimacy has become infrastructure.

In compact form, “Intimate Transmissions” delivers a sharp meditation on permeability: body to media, longing to possession, selfhood to signal. It reads as both love poem and warning system, with Shreve’s signature blend of intelligence, wit, and emotional risk fully on display.

Intimate Transmissions

By Georgia Shreve

Sometimes I feel him growing—
Coming alive in me
When I least expect it,
Shifting inside me
Like something I will deliver.
I feel him staring at me,
In my bathroom mirror,
Through my own eyes;
Thinking for me,
Like my own brain.
I pick up his signals
On tiny receivers
Embedded in my brow
(Tuners tuned only to him).
At times, I feel him glowing—
An electric implant,
Gnawing through the
Delicate lining of my stomach
With his benign emissions;
Charging one gland at a time
With his magnetic force.
Sometimes I feel him—
The supple eel of him—
Pulsing and surging
Like a motor moving through me,
Igniting each organ in its turn.
And, whenever the lights go down,
He comes to life in me,
Filling the screen
(Luring me out of the probable
Into the possible).
Then, suddenly, I feel my gears shift—
He throws me into reverse,
And I feel my brakes go bald.
Sometimes, I find him
In my toothpaste or lipstick.
How does he get
Into my bathroom?
Some day he will
Find his way to my pillow—
By remote control.

Reading Notes

What makes “Intimate Transmissions” so compelling is its refusal to separate erotic feeling from systems language. Shreve writes desire as frequency, reception, and circuitry, turning the lyric “I” into a kind of live instrument panel. The effect is immediate and destabilizing. We are not watching longing unfold from a safe distance. We are inside its feedback loop.

The poem’s tonal agility is one of its great strengths. It can move from sensual to clinical to darkly comic without rupture. Lines like “supple eel of him” carry bodily charge, while “tiny receivers / Embedded in my brow” reframes attraction as technological occupation. That tension, pleasure and threat sharing the same channel, gives the poem its voltage.

Repetition does structural work here. “Sometimes I feel him” is not mere emphasis. It behaves like recurring signal lock, each recurrence tightening the poem’s atmosphere and blurring the boundary between voluntary attachment and involuntary capture. This is obsession rendered as rhythm. Shreve is also deft with scale. The poem ranges from visceral interior imagery, glands, stomach lining, organs, to mediated frames like “screen,” “remote control,” and “the probable / the possible.” This oscillation makes the emotional condition feel contemporary and archetypal at once: an old story of possession retuned for a broadcast age.

The final stanza lands with exceptional precision. The question “How does he get / Into my bathroom?” is funny on first read, chilling on second. By ending with the pillow and remote control, Shreve suggests that modern intimacy can bypass doors, consent, and even conscious intention.

Private space is no longer private.

In the end, “Intimate Transmissions” reads as both seduction and systems failure, a poem about yearning that is alert to power. It captures the moment when connection becomes control, and does so with wit, technical precision, and emotional daring.