BISQUES
So many heads thrown on the potter’s wheel to be turned and born too early, unable to open half-
closed eyes. Impossible for an infant to hold its head up. We press the bundle to our breast, feed
the suckle instinct, place the infant with great care against our shoulders, holding the neck in
place. Still more are born, as if they were pots meant to be bought by philanthropists. As if they
could replace broken ornaments in razed mosques. We mothers go on holding the head attached
to its fleshless body, palms placed flat against this little wick of neck that could break apart and
crumble. We use words like bébé to indicate that no, others cannot hold our morsel of flesh. How
could anyone know how to feed and change and clothe it? Pulling cotton over the fontanel brings
a bout of screams, as if the blob were being thrown again into the business of birth. We soothe
these cries with lullabies. We watch our baby sleep on its back without a pillow, see its startle
reflex. We try not to think of when the head will be covered in a black hood and dragged by its
body into a courtyard to be shot.
ADDRESS TO MY PHANTOM LIMB
Close if you will, fist I never knew.
Epitomize grief to a widow or the sadness
of any week day, and also, Sunday rites
reserved for others—the fasting, the confession.
Ritual depends upon the hand to take in or push away.
Punch the face you lie next to in sensorial science,
if only in representation. Symbolize something.
Isn’t that what the mind
does best? Become more than this missing
all I didn’t do when I had you hanging from my arm.
Press the center of each note sung by gut strings
against an ebony fingerboard.
Hold the natural hair brush, stroke color and texture,
compose works as spurious as hogweed
found each August at the back of the half acre.
Become horticulture’s dreaded cartwheel flower.
Surely you are capable of imitation?
Tighten and release, find the light, lean into noon.
Open fully (even short a pinky)—
release ten thousand toxic seeds.
Let papery skin stretched tight from phalanx to phalanx
dry to a crisp, before flipping the bird
to each pursuit I followed
with the passion of one addicted to perfection.
Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Narrative Northeast, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. She has received awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Visit www.judithskillman.com
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