Emily Skaja

I HAVE READ THE WHOLE MOON

In March I drop an egg hoping a bird will fly out disbelieving
science. All the manuals tell me this is a logical contract.
You commit yourself to a shell & you end up flying. Fine.
Stone after stone I’m defacing the river of being in love with you.
True, I don’t care how that sounds. I have a list
of cocoons to transform my body: Uncontrollable
Shaking. Sleep Paralysis. Dread of Eating. I’m guilty
of pretending the roads to your house are no longer roads
but deerpaths angled crooked through the marsh. Again the water
doesn’t stop; it rains even when the weather is overdue: a holy
parallel. My mouth is rotted & anonymous. The bed needs oars.
I’m interested in dust but only new dust arriving unmarked
after you leave. After you leave, you leave &
thicketed in sludge I’ve been glued open. Self as spectacle:
Yolk marvel. Unbird. Emily as grave pillar as salt-lick as dammed up
luminous in thread. I have read the whole moon
cycle; it doesn’t explain the cracks. Mercury for once
cannot be blamed. My dishes float in soap like little planets.
I drop my hands in the sink. They come up feathered.

Emily Skaja grew up next to a cemetery in northern Illinois. Her work has recently appeared in Indiana Review, PANK, The Pinch, Pleiades, and Southern Indiana Review. She was selected as the runner-up for the 2014 Black Warrior Review Contest in Poetry. She is a third-year poet in the MFA program at Purdue, where she is the co-editor of Poetry for Sycamore Review.