Hi! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Telegram, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for visiting!
Diatribe
When the sister becomes a burden
I drop her at the railroad tracks,
her head a turquoise bauble.
When the sister grows too heavy
I take her to the convenience store
and trade her in for a pack of gum.
When my sister regresses into tantrum
I bind her in skeins of Mother’s yarn
and infinity signs of father’s cosmology.
I dress for her in a sack
when we pose for pictures
so she can stand pretty and be noticed.
Two PhD’s delivered our infant bodies
to Amerika, so I make myself less than
a person for her sake.
I try to forgive this stunt as well—
my child self mortgaged as caregiver.
My sister and I live alone in a deep well
where moon and sun change places
according to the whims of dead parents.
Bring me effigies and voodoo dolls.
My pins wound the heads of puppets.
My needles stick in the dictators’ craw,
fanning every which way.
Treatise
You could say cottonwood falls to earth.
You might say the white fluff contains catkins.
Neither of these statements is wrong. They miss
the point, which is that cottonwood
makes a crevice, an outline, signals
the end of May, the beginning
of a summer always come too soon
to allow happiness, pleasure, comfort.
Driven here and there by wind, a blizzard
for those unnerved, inarticulate hungers.
Number the trees along the boulevard.
You could say softness, like sex, is a thing
of the past. Perhaps your face caves in,
your eyelashes shorten beneath the gaze
of a German optometrist who would
explain propagation as a matter
of numbers. Irrational to the end,
these wishes still enter through sliders,
accompany you in the car, stick
to light sweaters. May you be well, a friend
writes, thinking to cheer you up.
Whether the seeds rise or fall
sickness has taken root in your sleep.
The architecture’s ruined. For proof, stage 4
doubles as dream-time. How can you rescue
the other, lighter woman, the one
who was drowned by a mask in order
to save two lives? Her infant grew beyond
the hospital and left mama behind
to fend off these intrusive peddlers.
To My God in His Affliction
Yellow tanagers thread the great wood.
We are told suffering
builds character, told of One who came to wear
a crown of thorns, to die for our manifold sins,
to free the body of its weight.
I watch the yellow tanagers needle the great wood
behind the house, I see the same gray carpet
under my feet. I walk into the mundane
as into a city whose gates close behind me.
Where the rash spreads, I hear the voices
of May birds for whom all is green and blooming.
Rectangular screens keep all
but the smallest gnat
and the largest wolf spider from entering
the house to which I have come
chained with hours,
alone with no words to exchange—
no laughter, no children, no toys.
How imagination chafes beneath the mass
of this dull sun meant for another world.
Judith Skillman is a poet and painter. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Threepenny Review, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. Her recent collections are A Landscaped Garden for the Addict, Shanti Arts Press; Oscar the Misanthropist, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award; and In Our Resemblance (with daughter Jocelyn Skillman), Goldfish Press. She is also co-editor, with Linera Lucas, of When Home is Not Safe, McFarland Books. Visit her website here.