This article explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio and Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli . Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, suspended and thereby allows for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity.