Emily Skillings

Receiver

And how am I supposed

After else

A word “green” written in red

The wet knife reaches

An arm through dark water

Her sucked idea, lonely

And which yellowed

One morning, yes

The silver utensil

As if I dreamt

The furniture showroom, full of repressed longing

Here is her review

Every page is blank! 

I cannot tell you how sorry

He arrives instead, having lost all

Newt on memory of leaf, wet with stale rain

In the new architecture, nowhere to sit

I don’t know what you want from me

Over the ground

The Bride of Tarantula (1967) 

The legs twist, opposing in air

Pulverized stone, yes and

We found the station where statues practice their singing,

As hunger follows

Unkind of me to say

Woolf says “a lump of pure sound”

Conspiring in a hive of glass

And didn’t Mary call her own body

“The woman who carries me about” 

I think you’d like to still me, the fumble or tremor

Sweet upon the seat

Pelvis, murky, rising to meet my face

97.5 FM, The Wound

Cream moon of her fingernail

We were at Junction Boulevard, or on it

And the trees changed their direction

Sight, my little diver

Locked drawer rattling with the complaints of gods

Forehead like a frayed calendar

And what of it

Now is under

Afraid, I–

Fisting the lilac vase for hymns

Look how I’m forgetting you, even as

All words are moved

And if I wrote what etched itself into sleep

Powdery, 

Beach of her

Idea for the Beginning of a Novel

The pills had been delivered, 

though she’d not been home

to receive them. They were sitting there

in a white paper bag, stapled shut

with her name on it: a popular given

followed by a strange and slightly severe word

and the date of her birth,

a humid day in August of 1988,

printed next to the instructions 

which might, she thought, 

mention milk

or heavy machinery.

She pictured the parcel on the small table,

with its rounded corners

and the chairs that fit cleanly over them.

“My boyfriend’s upstairs.

You can ring the bell,”

she’d said to Rick, a man

a company called Rx2Go

had sent to deliver medicine

all over Brooklyn, “and he’ll come down

to fetch them.” Rick’s voice was sweet but professional,

and as he’d asked for the apartment number,

her train, scraping through Connecticut, 

passed a small inlet 

crowded with twenty or so egrets

posed differently, otherwise identical,

like a gallery of sculptures of the same god

made of the same shimmering white stone.

“I live in apartment 3,”

she’d answered, “but there is no need to climb

the stairs. He will come down.”

It was starting to rain. 

Her neighboring commuter

abandoned her book 

for games of disappearing, bursting gems.

They made a small cry as they exploded.

“Have a nice day,” the man had said.

Soon she would feel better 

and in a few weeks 

this ride could be spent reading or writing

instead of staring out the window

cataloging her failures

or reviewing the growing list 

of everyone who disliked her. 

A spam email arrived on her phone.

It was lineated like a poem. 

She read it several times, as if

it were some urgent, sacred text

addressed only to her,

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Participation was naturally broadened.

We found another rehash of credit only administrations.

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Supplanting your exhausted service is fundamental.

Much obliged!

Inside a couple of seconds, your administration will initiate.

You've stirred things up around town of your proposed plan.

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If it's not too much trouble, answer with us on the off chance that you have any requests about how to drag out your entrance 

or on the other hand 

assuming you want direction.

and as she deleted it, she considered the ways 

it was better than her own writing,

as it was trying to move someone to do something.

Someone else’s cheek, imprinted in grease

on the window made everything a blur—

shocks of clarity where the wrinkles were.

And what she’d mistook 

for a dainty mound of cellophane,

a translucent slip 

of plastic on the lip 

of the window,

was actually a pile of acrylic fingernails

that someone who’d sat in her seat

earlier that day

had methodically removed

and placed there. It was so beautiful.

Like a mountain of tears

pushing through.

Lady Time Cradles Her Raspberry

a reverse lullaby

If you give me just a minute
I’ll rearrange the dream for you
The one you had
Where the plucked eye
Of the sun, finally sated
Rolled back its glossy form
Into the dark screen
Behind sleep

And the leopard snail
Turned her tender horns
To the underworld
Draping her leaving
Gold along the ground
For us to follow

The one where we told
Those responsible for our pain
Look, here it is, and a bright red beetle
Armored and clicking
Crawled out from the wound

And when they crushed it,
Bright red powder
Stayed on their hands,
Their garments, for years

The dream in which
All we’d discarded
Came knocking, wearing garlands
Of honeysuckle, latex, and aluminum
Singing “Now what? Now what?”

And when your other mother
With her skin of glass
Reached for her sewing purse
You could see all her inside workings
Like you were peering onto the factory floor

If you give me just a minute
I’ll take down your braids (she does them
So tightly) I’ll pull down the cameras
From the trees, rip out the microphones
From the centers of flowers

I’ll take the field
of sideways grasses
And place it here, where
We don’t need to do anything
But wait for morning

We can stay a while
In the looping words
The letters aired out
Clean as bone

Soon the ovals will flutter open
And the nostrils suck and flare
The tin sound of a question
Rings in stale air
On the other side, where

I can’t follow
The ceiling waits for you
A sheet of chalk, not without
its symbols. Dull as anything
But beautiful, certainly,
In its way