Each month we will be featuring a guest writer and this month Doug Tanoury returns with some new poems for us. Some other work by Doug can be found here.

Salome Dancing For Herod

If I was in the great hall
Of the palace
Watching Salome dancing
For Herod
I too would marvel
At movements
So erotic and executed
With animal precision

Her heaving breasts
Swaying pelvis
The white waves of her skin
Moving in soft undulations
Across her abdomen
And I smile knowing
That the king and I
Are both drunk with dance

And the beat of the music
The rhythmic flashing
Of bare thighs
Naked belly
Awaken the pagan in me
Who knows that lust is to love
What poetry is to prose
A sensual awakening of sight and smell
And sound and taste

And I would swear too
At that moment that the bounce
In each breast
Was worth the heads
Of a hundred prophets
And is more moving to me
Than the words
Of all the holy men in Judea

And I Am

And I told her
Matter of factly
That indeed I am
A poet of naked breasts
And that umber nipples
Centered in amber aureoles
To me are pupils
And Irises that serve
As windows to the soul

And I went on to say
Confident and self-assured
That I am too the bard
Of the bare thigh
That to me is nature revealed
Tan like the underside
Of sycamore leaves in fall
Softly wild and untouchable
As a sleeping doe

And I concluded by saying
That I am a lyric that can versify
The plump lushness of
A pale ass
In still-life form
Like so much fruit
As if it were a honey dew melon
Sliced in two and resting
On the kitchen table

At The Waldorf

At the Waldorf
Where desserts are done in art deco
And abstractions in chocolate
Twist in many shapes
Everything is golden

The lobby a cathedral
Large and brightly lit
At a table draped in white linen
Like an altar prepared
For solemn High Mass

I study the ceiling
Done in Greek revival
Where reliefs of nudes
In white plaster
Resemble marble

If you would like to contact Doug he can be reached here

You can find more articles in the archive under Guest Writer's Corner