Live Nude Poems

Speaking of great poems this time, from Poetry 365 -- You stand behind the old black mare, dressed as always in that red shirt, stained from sweat, the crying of the armpits, that will not stop for anything, stroking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted. I pick up my suitcase and set it down, as I try to leave you again. I smooth the hair back from your forehead. I think with your laziness and the drought too, you’ll be needing my help more than ever. You take my hands, I nod and go to the house to unpack, having found another reason to stay. I undress, then put on my white lace slip for you to take off, because you like that and when you come in, you pull down the straps and I unbutton your shirt. I know we can’t give each other any more or any less than what we have. There is a safety in that, so much that I can never get past the packing, the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy, come close between my thighs and let me laugh for you fro...

I discovered AI between the time I left graduate school and when I wrote steadily for ten years before I published anything. That fun period--let's call it, oh, 1999. I taught three comp courses at Emerson College, and two at Northeastern University, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other days of the week I worked at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street, and it was during that time, most likely stocking the shelves, I found her. It wasn't just what the Poetry Foundation bio calls her " uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers ," it was the sheer flux of her line, the skin-slipping dramatic monologues and the unabashed sexuality. Why is that women are more frank about sex and better able to write about real sex, as opposed the sometimes dreamy, sometimes porny world of male sex-writing? Question for another time . In any case, I immediately fell in love with her poems, and  I always re...