Naked Admission (a fantasy)

By Susan Comninos

I imagine the nudists rising
early to eat cheese, drink
café au lait, before
heading — all points
checked with their enfleshed fraternité,
their closest art-loving copains —
for the Louvre. To stare at torsos
and busts, laid in no-touch halls
with conditioned air, they must first
stop meeting au sous-sol —
where walls sport bleu veins
found on Roquefort flights, each
wedge as bottom-heavy as
an Anjou pear. So, launched like rafts,
hosts of naturists ride, all limbs and
padded seats on the Metro, zipped
in their maps of skin. Some hang
from questionably cleaned
poles. Others walk down the moist
morning streets, with unprotected backs
and hair. It’s a show: of bodies
hydraulically graced
by youth — and of others, freed
from the clothes that function
like slings. Sagging no more
at their exclusion from sights
like the Mona Lisa in pain — suffering
her societal ache: tooth
gripped by a tongue that will soon
be unstrapped, to lick a cut
on the thumb, or juice from the lips
after eating — our naked fellows,
our coterie of curated
corps, designed by DNA, spread
among the art. Then in homage
to a wired tour guide, they clot
in a klatch of courteous ears,
worn above stirred, then
shrunken chests. Like iron lungs,
puffed with air, the nudists become
so pure — like marbled installations, rarely
moved: near-statues, poised
in a Gallic light — unbleached
by windows set too high
to mar their original
breathing portrait
of skin.

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About Susan Comninos

Comninos’s poetry has most recently appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review, among others. New poetry is forthcoming shortly in both Juked and Ninth Letter.