 Judith Skillman’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, Zyzzyva, FIELD, and elsewhere. Awards include an Eric Mathieu King Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets. She is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit www.judithskillman.com Thinking about the Bull I imagine it must be quirky, male and stupid. Blinded by sweat, making the same charge towards the same fuchsia flag kept at a distance by the matador. Picadors fire Lilliputian arrows at leather skin draped in folds as if to stitch a garment over rage. Flies bother eyes that ooze goo, tail swatting as it groans, a heavyweight held aloft by jelly legs. Never quite feral enough to win. Fond of the steaks thrown by keepers who fatten this animal of festivals and orgies—catharsis for young men who carry the torero on their shoulders through town as what’s ordained lies slain on sawdust, seeping. It must be the illness Settled in to her mind and undid an ability. Maybe for math, as things have slowed. Reading pages. Seeing into the children. It must be some kind of finite capacity for cartwheels in the brain as in the body. Now the storm relents she hears a memory. To be this staid, this plain. To have no more razzmatazz than the road behind this lot, where a single car threads its lights through still standing winter firs. Bone Black The subject comes again, where I am to travel by tunnel across the water. I turn to leave through many houses carrying my useless cell, my bags. An old terror follows, many women, French accents. The day comes late, full of beauty. Blue jays rest between green leaves, songs come in waves. Each turn and twist lingers-- the paper money in my purse, folded bills I handed to the one who seemed in charge. My skirt wet, my linen jacket not quite covering enough of the danger, the liaison. When I return to the station the train has left for Prague, not Seattle. There will be no way to go home except by exposed streets and what if I am young? The men will offer and force themselves. Night comes to this day like every other with its cast, its crucible. Soliloquy of the MisanthropistThe Asplundh monkey climbs firs, waits for the all clear before four-foot lengths hit earth. Thuds shake my own be it ever so humble. Those neighbors I hope never to meet will have their new alleyway. Cut the forest in half, allow Mercedes access to a three-car garage where, if it were mine, the first do-it-yourself LHC with temps colder than deep space would send killer particles around magnetic tunnels to collide. The socks I wear: fourteen pairs of tubes all the same white flinching bright. Who has time for laundry? My ex-wife thought dinners communal deals—almost Biblical, her standards exponentially high. No sirree. I like uncooked top ramen, a zip-lock bag full of nuts and raisins and popcorn in the microwave, kernels getting so excited they crackle and riff. The Band-Tailed Pigeons You called ring-tailed doves are merely average.
It’s true the feathers gloss liquid in sun. The appearance of a necklace adds a bit of luxury as first one, then two, then thirteen come to eat the seed you throw out on our moss driveway. One evening through your telescope, you photographed said dove at the top of the farthest fir tree on the acre. Look, you said. I believed the circle of lens, the inside story. I believed because I was gullible, hungry for those whose rank and file it is to perform the will of their leader.
0 Comments
|
RSS Feed
