In the Flesh: Stag at Sharkey's, 1909
Desire bruised into motion
As the oxblood face drips fresh fear into him, the man’s mind sinks to the hardness of bone — how it leans into shape, softening the certainty of the face, the hardness in his line of sight — sunken into the moss of cloth, the hardness of the body he let inside him in the steam- dim shower of the gym, where he had learned to brace against a man mid-swing. The artist has left us with bodies straining past their will — muscles caught on the edge of drift. In bed, the ache to unmake a man twists two fists inside him. This, he thinks as his right hook arcs over the referee’s bulk to lay a kiss of battered flesh upon another’s hip.
