My name is Podrigotuma and I love love poetry because love poetry rather than describing

the entirety of love between people or trying to describe the technicalities of sex can

sometimes just go into a small moment and speak of the gaze of a lover's ear or the taste

of their neck or the feel of their hand on your back and that brings us to an intimacy

that is both private as well as inviting.

Life drawing by Auree Villeneuve.

How she is quiet before his robe falls each week to his ankles.

This man who sits nude for my wife, whom she draws with contests and pastel pencils,

each page in her notebook is a parade of his torsals, galley proofs of breastbones and chests.

She explains because these lines are my favourite and shows me traces with her knuckle tip,

chin to sternum, jaw to shoulder, clavicle to cusp of the arm.

How in three passes an artist makes a place for a head to rest.

Later in blue and orange pigments mixed at the edge of a knife thinned with linseed oil

and mineral spirits, my wife will paint him on a canvas primed black.

Again, his body will end just above the pelvis, will fade into a fog of armrest or shadow,

cushion or hip as if rendered in some fugitive dye.

Because he is only the second man I have seen naked in person.

He is just the third I have seen in my life.

When I tell my wife I want to write about her naked sketch her back's faint taper as a class might to check perspective,

describe the moles I notice on the underside of a breast as we make love.

She says I can.

And in return, she will paint the whole of me, bare from the neck down as I pose in our living room.

...