by Will Cordeiro

Cozy on the nude
beach at Sandy
Point, New Jersey,
not as randy as I’d
thought I’d be
watching the burly
men sunbathe &
roast their bulging
paunches pink. In
my rinky-dink fold-
out lawn chair flip-
ping through the Sun
-day Times, as random
gusts keep snapping
ripping shaking so
I have to mash it
into little squares:
when the story’s
continued elsewhere
(page B9) I’m starting
to get surly until
I hear the crash of
big waves slapping
on the shoreline while
seagulls riffle & dicker
over spilled Ruffles.
Having read my fill,
I bolt into the break-
water’s wrinkled plaits
of foam for a skinny
-dip, splashing down
as a dashing wave
folds over me, my
cock shrinking back
from the cold shock.

Will Cordeiro has previously worked as a NYC Teaching Fellow, a staff writer at the theater magazine offoffonline, and as an assistant editor of Epoch. He has an MFA in poetry from Cornell, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying 18th Century British literature. He is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Playwrights Collective and has had several plays produced in regional and off-off-Broadway venues. For the past two years he has been the Artist-in-Residence at Risley Residential College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Brooklyn Review, lafovea, Baltimore Review, Dirt, Paradigm, Sentence andWord for/Word. His poetry reviews have appeared in Jacket.