A Lascivious Tray

For my housewarming you arrive with a cooler on whose ice a bottle of Moet and Chandon Brut Imperial champagne waits, and a power drill to hang my curtains.

While you hang, I toss organic baby spinach, fat green leaves, sliced large white button mushrooms, raw and thick, thin wheels of hot red onion, peeled sliced sweet mango, a handful of ground walnuts, slivered almonds, flax and sunflower seeds in a raspberry vinaigrette.

On the sectioned tray I lay ripe strawberries sweet as jam, green grapes, sinful fresh figs.

From its wooden case, I lift fresh smoked wild Sockeye salmon and lay it down.

Large green olives stuffed with garlic nestle beside the focaccia embedded with olive slices, sun-dried tomatoes, chopped onion and herbs.

Around balls of sweet honey dew melon I wrap ribbons of proscuito.

Peeling the papers from the cheeses, I uncover Isigny Sainte Mère, a creamy Normandy Camembert, Pont-l’Evêque, a soft cheese, pungent white Cheddar, tangerine-coloured rich Mimolette, and from sweet sheep’s milk a soft Italian Percorino Toscan Fresco.

It is a steamy June day.

We take each other’s clothes off in the enrapt way way lovers do. We feed each other with our mouths, teeth, fingers. We hold strawberries between both our lips and bite them.

We sip long crystal flutes and drizzle champagne into each other.

I’m sure I lap-dance, it’s becoming a blur. Leonard Cohen’s woman, that beautiful Anjani, sings soft, sultry songs of his poems.

Lust breathes us.

Later, drunk, I dance in the living room, a naked middle-aged woman.

The curtains are drawn tight.

This morning I videod my exercising, dancing, and then layered so many filters on the footage Final Cut Express says it’ll take 4 days to render a 12 minute section! I’m currently trying to circumnavigate that by saving to QuickTime, but that’s a 20 hour process! Oy ya. These stills may be all that there is to show of my afternoon’s work. Let’s just say, three years later, not naked.

It was a memorable night, perhaps our best, but our last. I’ve kept the empty bottle of champagne on my shelf since then, knowing I had to write about it. In the Winter I received a letter from his other lover and then we discovered each other, though I had ended my relationship with him not long after the evening I write of here. This is a section from a much longer prosepoem that will, I hope end a manuscript.
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This prosepoem piece was written for Big Tent Poetry’s May 28th poetry prompt: aphrodisiac.