Emily Skillings
Forgetting Something
We think, possibly, you may have left
something in your cart.
Did you want to complete your purchase?
You might regret not possessing
that which you delicately and with care considered
from the rank enclosure of your bedroom
wrapped in a damp towel, face touched
by a taxonomic blue
from that endless river of rectangular light
by which you are carried into yourself.
A catalogue enters your hypothetical flesh.
The green shape on a chain
both geometric and organic
whose purpose is only to mesmerize.
A bowl with some animal. The wash
scented with milk and crushed flowers
in which blades of heat were embedded
by the chemist’s hand. He once said of you
to a mutual friend, she’s doing such impressive things
for a woman so young. We know
you felt humors rush
towards false exits in your body.
Your desire, we suspect, is a bit like the sky—
no rubber bladder, no soft border
of tissue to hold it back. “You are not yet this
but could be.” Your liquid eye heaves
itself, with great difficulty, over everything
even the parallel tracks
of pebbles inlaid in the fine mud
of the road. All is customizable.
The wool cape we hold for you
is infused with the lived experiences
of a guaranteed half-dozen
promising students of art. And that resin circle
peony-shade, its yielding color
somewhat a betrayal
of its hardness, is just a click away
from taking up its new role
as window to your wrist.
Secret Sauce
“The Young-Girl carries the mask of her face…The
Young-Girl doesn't get old; she decomposes.” –
Tiqqun, Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
FLOWER-INFUSED CLEANSING MILK
JASMINE AND LILY HEALING MASK
REDNESS RELIEF SOOTHING SERUM
SOOTHING MOISTURE MASK
CALM WATER GEL
ALL-DAY SKIN HYDRATING CREAM GEL
ANTI-POLLUTION FINISHING ESSENCE
HYDRATING PEPTIDE AND VITAMIN B5 EYE CREAM
WITH TAMARIND, SOY, WHITE MULBERRY
META CELL RENEWAL CORRECTIVE EMULSION
MINERAL EYE CREAM
HYALURONIC HYDRA PRIMER
COLORLESS LINE FILLER
HYDRANCE AQUA-GEL
RESOLUTE HYDRATING BODY BALM
BIOLUMIN-C EYE SERUM
LUCENT FACIAL CONCENTRATE
ACTIVATED CHARCOAL MASK
PRE AND PRO-BIOTIC FACIAL MIST
BIOKISS™ LIP BALM
ILLUMINATING ANTI-FATIGUE EYE CREAM
TRIPLE LIPID RESTORATIVE CREAM
PINE FOREST REDEMPTION SCRUB (FOR THE BODY)
PROTINI™ POLYPEPTIDE CREAM
NIGHTLY REDEFINING MICRO-PEEL CONCENTRATE
OXYGENATING MILK VIP
BLACK PEPPER BETA-CAROTINE EMOLLIENT
CONCENTRATED BRIGHTENING ESSENCE
ROSEHIP BEAUTIFYING CLEANSING OIL
“ULTIMATE LIFT” M CREAM
WHITE STRETCH MARK EXFOLIATING AND ERASING CREAM
DETOXIFYING NIGHT TREATMENT, ALL TYPES
NORMALIZING FACE BARRIER
LIGHTWEIGHT ROSE PETAL LAYERING SERUM
DEEP MARINE SERUM
THE BASIC OIL
HOPE GREEN CREAM
BROAD SPECTRUM MINERAL VEIL
Turpentine
We were playing WORDS.
It was a game of your devising
with no objective. We’d just had sex
rather slowly, and (I might add)
experimentally, and lay sweating
in the air conditioning, holding hands
facing each other with eyes closed.
The sheets were inexpensive—
an abrasive violet we cratered into.
The idea, you explained, was to say a word,
but it had to be just the right one. It would come
from somewhere deep and inquisitive, must sound
meaningful inside the mouth. You cautioned me
against a kind of cleverness
to which you must have felt I was predisposed.
Let’s begin, you said, and paused
for what felt like a very long time.
“Tumble” you said. “Celery”
I replied, almost instantly.
With polite tenderness, you explained
that the only rule to WORDS
was you weren’t allowed to fetch your own
until after your partner had offered theirs
as it was not a game of quick association
or one of blurting, but one of deep reflection
and slowness. I admitted
how it was difficult
for me to resist beginning to think
of my next word
immediately after I spoke one,
and you assured me this was normal,
that you could combat this tendency
by thinking of an image
or noticing a sound in the room.
But images and sounds
are attached to words I thought.
I cannot escape them.
We moved along like this for some time,
and as you searched for your next word with a resonant calm,
I realized I could cast a red line into the dark, further and further away from me,
and when the time came I could simply reverse the direction of the line,
which would reel in a true word, a word unfettered by thinking, imagination, or good taste.
Before this moment I’d noticed I’d tended more towards vocabulary words,
the sonically intricate, while you spoke pool and toad and hum into the air above my eye.
It was the kind of game I wasn’t exactly fond of, one that presented as being free of judgement
but was actually impossibly judgmental. Then you said a pretty boring word I can’t remember
and I loved you so much.
Do you play this when you are alone? I asked. This is a really weird game, and what it is keeps slipping
from me. “Please, no sentences or phrases” you said. “Noontime.”
“Mollusk” I said, too quickly again, regretting it almost instantly, wishing instead I’d picked the vulgar
“clam.”
Once I’d sat at a picnic table near the place of my birth, looking out at the sea, eating a bucket of
bivalves that when steamed, are commonly referred to as “steamers.” Bringing one up to my face, I
found a transparent worm jutting out of the grit of its belly, like a hand reaching out of a grave. Butter
had dropped nauseatingly from the whole organism.
I found it was my turn again. You were taking sometimes two or three minutes to retrieve your word
which I thought was a bit much, but it allowed me to go to some interesting places. I was beginning to
get bored and I wanted to get up to write. I tried to clear my mind of language. To pick my next word, I
went into a dark internal thicket without thinking of the word thicket, moving shapes out of the way
until I got to a clearing and something formed. It was like the moment in the movie theater where the
film’s title materializes slowly on the screen and you get a little chill of recognition. That’s a good one,
you said. Thanks, I said. I’m pretty proud of it. I had waded through nothing to get here. I was at the
edge of something translucent and thick. It moved a little with my breath, a living organ that went on
forever. Did it shimmer? Psychoanalysts often speak of authenticity, a zone of being I’ve always had
trouble inhabiting or conceptualizing. My high school English teacher told us never to use the word
“being” in our writing. “A lazy word,” she’d said. Nevertheless, I’d enjoyed its neutrality. I’d never quite
been able to avoid it. You had fallen asleep.
Motorbike, I said. Grotto. Eel. Hello. Silver. Tuck. Disuse. Oslo. Salinity. Limp. Orphan. Porno. Lottery.
Again. Snot. Crouch. Over. Glass. Again. Mother. Plague. Ascending. Town. Nobody. Inherit. Ingrown.
Curl. Hunter. Snow. They. Drum. Worker. Log. Amber. Cube. Footsteps. Ear. Found. Heron. Question.
None. I realized then that some version of this game would likely continue for the rest of my life. I
thought of the shape my mother slung over her shoulder, how I would reach inside and pull out each
thing and consider it only to put it back into the hole it came from.
Daphne
This thing happens
You write half a poem
And then stop
At the first sign of difficulty
So you have all these half-poems
The drooping heads of flowers
You call lilies as a placeholder
Stemless, waiting
Open-mouthed. To go back in
And look on them
Is something horrible
Better to forget they are there
Like the dream in which you know you’ve left
Your little baby all alone
If only you could recall where
And you’re trying to stay positive
Was it under the pile of coats
Or in the closet
It needs the blue and meditative light
That runs from your body. Its name
The name of a flower, Daliah,
Delilah? Oh the pitiful thing
Must be somewhere, shriveling
In a box, an atrophied pile of sound
There is a window
Opens onto a field
Opens onto a dancefloor, opens
Onto a graveyard
Rachel, your most glamorous friend
Muses that the present has become
For all children, an ambient gel
In which the catastrophic and the banal
Ride at indistinguishable frequencies
She passes you a glass
And soon Delia
Is only a nagging thought
You have worn the black blouse
Encrusted in sequins
The pattern, venereal
Pink, gold, blue,
They flash as you twist your bones
Inside their fleshy
And mostly biodegradable case
You repeat a movement
That is like wilting
At an accelerated speed
To remind any onlookers
How you once wrote poems
In one there was a blender
Full of white glue
With a fly swimming in it
With a fly drowning in it
You could stick your hand in
Press “pulverize” or “pulse”
But to what end
You’ve neglected the paperwork
All your life
Beyond the door, the grass is wet
The lawn strewn with what
You can’t entirely say
Traipse
the impossible word
sloshes around
a mood looking for an exit
and seaweed gets on the clock, a bit
of silt at six’s curve
there is no finish on the day
it just kind of slumps over
and there’s another one
to stab you like a cartoon predator
with a blade of straw
which just a moment ago
waved, long and golden
from the mud slit
between teeth
I feel I’m supposed to be monitoring something
but what exactly? I see your outline
your shadow jaw
better in the dark
as the hermit crab crawls
between LCD screen displays
what choice have I—
I could die from sadness
green, powdery and collecting
in the low places where everyone hates me
I’ve been so bad, so wrong,
he gets me with a mallet
at the base of a tree
the black cloud of smoke that creeps
is my childlike wonder leaving
to perfume
our postcard backdrop
Hello from wherever
the hell this is
I’m calm
Heaven
“Take the things you say because you can’t write poems
and figure out how to write some.” —Dorothea Lasky,
“The Poetry That Is Going to Matter After You Are Dead”
The line is all I have
Is my response
To you, one of these poets
Whose hatred of their art
Rests so thickly in the mouth
As to almost clog it
You who use poetry
As a kind of signal
But don’t write it, not really
And think we should all
Be writing pert little essays
Or etching swollen fields of hyperlinks
Or archiving a leak from 1976
Don’t you know you could be speaking
Directly to the dead
Like this, like I can
I am doing it now
I can tell
When you take a shit
Your feet up
On some low bamboo stool
So waste can better fall
From out your hole
I know you are weeping
Secretly into the spine
Of The Age of Anxiety
No, worse
Into the poet’s fleshy back
The words grow wet
And begin to stink
Listen you skein of mold
You asbestos clown
You excuse you joyless
Sorrowless person
The line break is all
I have in this world
It is the mother
The wave and the undertow
The reconstituting cliff
I will jump from
My whole life
No matter how much
I want to end
I end up
Right back at the top
Staring out, face slightly perplexed
By the machine that returns my gaze
Her eyelashes heavy
With bees, or often
Snow. I know inside
The pour of this exchange
I will never die
I will just reappear
I will “GO OUT” in order
That I may “COME
TO,” slipping under
The anesthesiologist’s mirror
To swim the silver channel
Beyond recognition
That waits for me
Just on the other side
I’ll get shot out, gasping
Into a cracked grotto
In which blue waters dance
Over the stones and moss
My hair all in clumps
Will soon dry
I am not even close
To beautiful, am dumb,
Or numb at least
I’ve no husband
Nor a career. No children
Pull at my flesh
Though heavily I am leaned
Upon. The break
The relentless coming of days
The do it again
And do it now, this
Is my heaven
I leave it
In order that I may return
Wearing this very crown
Of asemic darts
Why dance with invention
Everything is here already
The snake you know
Escapes his former skin
So that you might pick it up
And drape it in the direction
Of your voice. Listen,
Can you hear that whoosh
That is language turning over
It makes a sweet sound
Kicks up a scent from the dirt
It too is yours
You do not need any permission
Certainly not mine
But you, poet
You know this already
And in this moment, balancing
On the outer rim
You will give it up
For no one
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not. Her poems
can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic,
jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement
of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was
published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna*
Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series.
Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where
she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches
creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.