I would peel you apples just to see fall’s crisp juice color your lips.
You are so far from me
though
that I wield the knife mutilating the fruit
and bury Eve’s sin deep beneath pastry.
Perhaps the smell of it cooling on the window sill will bring you here
and I will yet taste your mouth
and know everything. -Skye
The girl cutting apple, 1938, Andre Derain
Photo Credit: “Eyes as Big as Dinner Plates” Photo series by Riitta Ikonen & Karolyn Hjorth
Fecund life Comes through me Covers my back and lines my Throat Holding me silent
Tell your tales On the long night ‘round bonfires Wild pagan gestures
Appease The demands of lessor gods Looking down from the great hall
Then press your feet into my ample back I am the Mother I will carry you.
Eleionomae
Down by the water heavy with silt and frogs the quick green eyes follow you
The mud’s daughter Lingering among the reeds The winsome whispers keep you near
Old as the bayou gator Hungry too Reaching out for you
A finger dipped Framing the lovely face in ripples Moments before you break the water.
-Skye
Partly Sunny
Cat crosses the road The sidewalk is sunny there What about Chicken?
-skye
Thin strips of flayed flesh String the bow.
Time is always conducting us in and out of measure.
The ghost of my own making holds fast to darkness
Though, I let go so long ago
Learning to play for no one with fingers once broken
Beautiful terrible music unleashed into the world for me for me
for you.
-Skye
Requiem by Burak Ulker
Walking
The sky is milk The sea is quicksilver The beach is leaden
No birds No nimble crabs Just human passengers Traveling along the break of day
-Skye
Time Transient Taste of deconstruction
The graffiti coats my tongue
The sky ogles the bare mattress The broken mirror calls back to her Bare naked light
Somewhere in the rubble We are submerged In frothy fragrant water
Somewhere in the motes of dust.
-Skye
Somewhere north of midnight the priest’s prayers flicker through the hall a verse for each bead on the rosary twisted in your fingers a forgiveness for each sin real and imagined
I have morphine and lorazepam I have a few precious minutes to wait with you
Yet It’s the priest with tired old prayers and absolutions in pleasing baritone that stills your thrashing that quiets your moans
I don’t understand this young man in the cassock who will never wear a wedding ring bathing you in ancient words perfect in their cadence never straying from the book held absently
When you join him your weak voice dragged up from ether
I mouth quietly The relic of childhood Effortlessly bubbling up to join you
Yea though I walk through the valley of death… -Skye
This is Wyoming
The barbed fence undulates into the horizon The long rollers of the deep old sea feathered with grass Dotted with pronghorn and ghosts of buffalo
Capped in bright sky
The great plain The red car zipping Through the simmering tar
The woman almost 50 The woman bright and lively after 70
Talk rolls back and forth
Some thunder
There have always been hard lines Etched in old oceans There has always been wind cutting across the plane Changing everything
-Skye’s Poem