Live Nude Poems

Trespassing Aloud Listening to the wind misspell my name I sense desperation, a bruise of waxen yellow flesh. The wind explores the ruins of a factory abandoned decades ago, a complex of smokestacks and oil tanks, brown weathered brick and rusting machines the use of which no one alive knows. Why is the wind taunting me with its private misery when grease stains almost eighty years old still offer comforting stinks. I shouldn’t be here exploring private if useless property. I should go home and practice spelling my name correctly in case the wind has influenced my flimsy sense of myself. The factory closed after the war. Not even mice find sustenance or aesthetic pleasure in noting the aloof geometry, purposeful and rigid enough to warp the wind. I pocket a large rusty bolt and declare myself a petty thief, giving voice to all this loss. William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recen...

Tomatoes Why were women called tomatoes in the Thirties when depression shrouded the rumpled continent? We watch too many old movies, their gray shades overlapping and their dialogue too brittle to ape in ordinary life. The actors died so long ago their photo-imagery has thinned to one dimension, their contracts expired in dusty sighs. Sporting your tomato-red parka, you stalk to the frozen river to watch for eagles returning for spring. Too early. The windy part of March arrives tonight, banging trash cans and snapping tree limbs to kill the power and douse us in dark. We might waste a day or two with the generator whining so loudly we can’t think aloud. No one in old movies worries about windstorms toppling trees onto their sound-stage housing. But in every film some chubby guy in a bowler calls some woman a tomato, and no one objects. We wonder why that vinous fruit rather than an orange, a squash, a grape, apple, or cauliflower? We don’t grow tomatoes...