Will and I sat outside the VA on a bench, watching cars circle for spots while an ambulance blared from the dock around the corner. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, trying to erase the last hour of our lives from my memory, focusing instead on the weather and our neighbor’s wife they’d found in the freezer. We’d read the article in the paper that morning an effort to distract ourselves from the appointment. We knew what today would be—but we didn’t want to. We couldn’t entertain the idea, so we read the paper. We never read the paper, and now I knew why. You learn horrifying things like your neighbor shoved his wife’s dead body in the freezer after she’d had a heart attack.…
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The body’s tense shoulder, its skin in a slip
with its mouth full of ribbons ––
How it sways with rain.
Slow coming on, the low horn –– same, same.
The stammering squeal of rail and wheel rising,
the face framed in reflection ––
The flash in the retina ––
A scattering, clouds, etcetera ––
The exit and smell of wet steel, the perforating flash
of white woods –– the elongated cry of the cat ––
the mind’s relent, gather, slack ––
Its penchant for rain ––
– Bevil Townsend
Author’s Note: This poem, among others, is an elegy for my late father and they come from a longer manuscript, Birdsong and Buckshot: An Elegiac Echo. I worked to construct these mellifluous poems through both traditional and invented forms to echo the bodily constraints the speaker experiences here in the physical world.…
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We’re hand in hand in the dusk on a long stretch of drying asphalt. Traffic lights do their thing unobserved by a single individual. Although its midsummer, dark blue clouds block out much of the sun. The horizon is a strange and brooding pastel. It barely stopped raining and we’re so happy together. When the rain resumes we just take our shirts off. The light present is chimerical and seems to change position in the sky every building we pass. It could be any day, any decade. No cars pass us by during our ten miles or so stroll, no airplanes fly overhead. The one she arrived on is having its wings de-iced somewhere beyond the horizon in another world, consuming a new batch of explorers.…
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I
Did he not see?
that my stars were piqued by other starry fires
and I was chalking up
tediously
the hands of would-be ghosts,
that I was reaching for
the crags that would harden
my knuckles with shame
for my fear
my inaction out of fear,
my lack of art.
II
Little pine needles
scrape the arches
of my feet
in my inadequate shoes
He told me how to wear shoes properly,
bought me a good pair
and I’m sorry I sold them
I couldn’t I just couldn’t
and I’m sorry, you now, that I couldn’t bring myself
to teach you the same …
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Judith Skillman’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Web, the UK Kit Award, and is included in Best Indie Verse of New England (to mention just a few honors). Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, and her work as an artist has also attracted notice. She’s published sixteen poetry collections of acclaim, which you can find at her official website.
How did you decide on the title of your new poetry collection, Come Home to Winter?
A number of the poems deal with “the dark seasons,” at least here in the northwest: autumn and winter: “The Quaking Aspen’s First Autumn,” for instance. Then there more than a few pieces about aging, including “Rheumatism” and “Mobility”. It seems fairly clear, now that I am in my mid-sixties, that winter is more than an apt metaphor for the aging process, and also, ultimately, for mortality.…
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I didn’t know how long I’d been running but what I did know is that I was finally tired. My tennis shoes had holes from the pressure of slamming down the ball of my right foot – a nasty habit my mom used to warn me about. I took them both off, left and right, sat on the curb and thanked my right foot for always trying the hardest.
“Your balance is off – you’ll never run as fast as you want to if you keep abusing your feet like this.” I could hear her say it as if she were right next to me.
This bothered me. I wasn’t abusing my right foot, I was testing its limits. I was testing my limits. And we were fine standing on our own and didn’t mind a challenge.…
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“Oooooo, Dona!” Mrs. G calls as she hurries along the path to our hut from the central plaza.
“Oooooo, Dona!” she cries again, announcing herself as she approaches our door on the perimeter of the village. Bowed legs wobble beneath a protruding belly from her diet of starchy manioc tubers. The wife of a village elder, a lifetime of brutal heat and sun has browned her wrinkled face making it hard to guess her age. She calls me “Dona” in Portuguese as a term of respect, meaning “Madam”.
We’re in the tropical forest south of the Amazon River in central Brazil. My husband Bem and I are living among the indigenous Bororo people, doing anthropological research. We finish our cold breakfast of leftover rice from yesterday’s dinner just as Mrs.…
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