Dance, with Boobs
“A dance class? In the nude?”
My brother-in-law was so indignant
even his nose stood erect. He rolled
his eyes at my sister. Thoughts scrolled
across their foreheads in tandem, plain
as any marquee, Alex will rot in Hell
before we’d send him to a school
like that… and I couldn't explain
how it was
in the seventies. How we’d
whip off our shirts at the drop of a hat.
Mark, my old dance teacher, may
have been a bit of a leach, okay, was, but
even so, something was there. Something
about naked bodies moving through space,
leaping across the floor, your shape traced
behind, angels printed in imaginary snow.
The muse only comes
once you’re
unclothed, ready to be ravished or spurned.
Vulnerability is our lure, we strip to the bone
for her, and what could be more vulnerable
than my naked nineteen year old breast
tracing arcs in the studio air?
—Ellen Cole