Who is your ideal reader? a lit mag asked,
and after careful thought, I decided
it’s Daniel Craig, circa 2006,
deliberately emerging from the sea
in his little blue shorts, flinging water
from his hair, swaggering through the waves
and onto the beach, white sand clinging
to his bare feet and somehow muscular ankles,
striding to the chaise longue beside mine,
and opening a book of my poems.
His eyes, blue as the Bahamian waters, blue
as his minuscule shorts, undress the page,
flickering at line breaks, tracking back
to a knotty image or a turn of phrase he likes.
He’s not James Bond, because all
of Bond’s lovers die horribly,
and I don’t want to die just yet, not
on a beach white as bedsheets, when my ideal reader,
2006 Daniel Craig, has just
discovered my poems. He finishes and turns
those glacial eyes to me. He nods, and I
can breathe again. I pour him a tall glass
of lemonade—remember, he’s Daniel Craig,
not Bond, and it’s too early in the day
for martinis. “Thanks,” he says. He sips,
and with salt-kissed hands, turns the page.
Juliana Gray’s third poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press, 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Willow Springs, Allium, storySouth, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
Elsewhere on the site: read more about Issue 21.2, and peruse a special folio on writing about sex.
