"Salt dune :: Last nude" by Reuben Gelley Newman

Salt dune :: Last nude

         Tennessee Williams in Provincetown

He posed on a dune
in the nude.

Everything calibrated
as a dancer, tail braced
against the wind’s light banter
and unspooled in a dune’s loops,
valleys where longing pools:
author, playwright, plover, tern.

Plover minus the “p” is lover.
Ptown a sand globe where lovers rove,
piping plovers under human pressure, rarified salt
air, promises that last—

or don’t. Now my boyfriend
and I look toward the finer body

of love, how it shifts at a vowel’s tenor, water’s touch:
belly laughter or soluble anger, a savored syllable, desires so uncouth

they riptide a man’s heart. Everything left
behind, everything dared, dreamt, or felt—

now I’m lost in the sky’s blue,
now pouring a thimbleful of lube.



Appears in Dear Dear (from Trio House Books, 2026; reprinted with permission) 

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Audio: Reuben Gelley Newman reads “Salt dune :: Last nude”

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Reuben Gelley Newman is a writer, librarian, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the chapbook Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), and his poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, Ninth Letter, Only Poems, and Salamander. A former intern at Copper Canyon Press, he has edited for The Adroit Journal and Couplet Poetry. His reviews have appeared in Adroit, The Brooklyn Rail, and Diode. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from University at Buffalo and a BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College.

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