D. Antwan Stewart

SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE

At the end of this pale, phosphorescent day,
a curtain of black birds swoop-flutters and parts,
revealing two beautiful men: nothing more than gauze,
filaments of cloud rolling at the silver rim.  Rippled limbs
entangle like knots of vine latticing trees as one
lover fists the arced moon, an ornament gliding down
his arm, and at the bank's edge, I dress down to bare
flesh, waiting for the scythe of moon to appear undulant
on the surface. I will splash into stars, swim
stroke by stroke through chilling membrane,
determined to wade, ecstatic, in the nook.

D. Antwan Stewart's manuscript "The Terribly Beautiful" was a finalist in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series and is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press. He was a 2004 fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and is currently a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry at the Michener Center for Writers M.F.A. Program in Writing. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in New Millennium Writings, The Seattle Review, Poet Lore, Bloom Magazine, Paper Street, storySouth: The Best of the South 2005, and others. He is poetry editor for Bat City Review.