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Pam Nude for No One




   

I thought it was a washing machine’s porthole

behind a screen of static

but it was her mouth

Pam nude for no one

she recited a sestina

and a theremin

badgered us

at your abandonment birthday

party the sound of waterflow

stopped—a bubblebath

not a victim’s

she knew her mouth was underwater

under the guilt quilt

rust but without rust’s glamour

the jilting boy

the boy who jilts

the jilter himself a pride node

nodding in sympathy

with the rude door’s psychopathology

an oracle told me to speak

slowly and theocratically

as if entering a sump

to escape

a mucus membrane existence

the sticky walnut geniality of a humoresque

in a world limited to four pitches

you must choose the fifth

mouth behind a screen of static

nude for no one

only the hoyden

or the boy who forsakes the vague voyager

glaucous under the drenched eaves






Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published 24 books, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award).  His newest book, a novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, was published by FSG in March 2026.  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award.  He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.