Brian Kates

She listened as I’d read my awkward lines of verse at night, sitting, legs splayed and silent, on the bed in shabby underpants–you could hardly call them panties: faded cotton, color indeterminate, loose-fitting, frayed. (Stray threads caressed her thighs; a poet in times past might rhyme with envy on those loose ends). Her breasts were

We watched the mermaid comb seaweed from her haughty breasts as moon-pulled waves sang their timeless John Cage song beyond our outward gaze beneath the pier that August night in Provincetown. Only silence passed between us. And wonder. And a night of blissful sleeplessness.