Ed Skoog’s poetry has appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and NO: a journal of the arts. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Skoog graduated from Kansas State University, and holds his MFA from the University of Montana. Currently, Skoog is the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellow at George Washington University, and splits his time between D.C. and Seattle. Previous to that, he was the writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. The following five poems are from his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight © 2009, Copper Canyon Press, and appear here with his and the press’ permission.

RECENT CHANGES AT CANTER’S DELI

The telephone is no longer upstairs.
Cut fruit in a cold cup will never be whole.
Nothing is where it was. The plate
is beside the bowl. My mind’s all fucked up,
distorted, pale light reflected on stainless steel
of the walk-in-cooler. It is not where it was.
Here’s the spike to build a body of receipt.
Sweat collects on the waterpitcher lip
like the goodbye of a woman I loved.
The clerk bends his body to pray the miracle
of the handwashing station, turns knife to loaf.
The present pours into the pepper shaker.
It settles on the silk ivy of the now. Odds fade
in the sports section fallen between the counter,
where paying my bill I orphan a dime
for a silver mint, and the window snows sun
brilliant on Fairfax, demanding the commute.
They are not letting me drive anymore
and turning onto Melrose on the bus,
the driver, I overhear, has another job,
one he doesn’t know the name for.
Up in the haze some undiscovered animal
watches us, its plan mapped out, fire
swinging up the canyons, unfolding
until flame may flicker tip of sabertooth fang
in the museum where rare finds are hidden.
I, too, am a dinosaur. Rawr. My little claws.
I’m the dredge flopping for tar from the pits.
Click. I am a kind of David Bowie
in the Amoeba everything’s-a-dollar-bin.
I have four fingers and a thumb on my right hand,
equal representation on the left, and fourteen
billion toes. I’m a windup rooster. Who I am
and what I feel are irrelevant enough to be central
to the project of contemporary American poetry.
Or perhaps any art. Poetry’s just the form
of unimportance I teach teenagers above L.A.
under slanted windows that kill, by surprise,
the birds we then write about, gathering bonfire
around the small corpses, because it’s cold here.

THE CAROLERS

in scarf and boot turn
around our neighbor’s pine,
spill grog into snow,
approaching our porch with
“O Come All Ye Faithful.”
A few stumble or sing wrong,
open the door, Jim for
come let us adore him.
Annual Christian, pipered
by their pied joy, I lean
to follow when they go.
A hand holds me back.
The lead caroler, encountering
our Ford glazed with ice,
undeterred, opens the door
and crawls right through,
knees on the seat, gloves
on the dash and headrest.
The rest follow, pulling
“I Saw Three Ships”
through the car like a rope.
Soon I am falling asleep
in vast winter bedroom silence,
and I am singing with them
through local traffic
houses towns lives
exile and years of night.

EARLY KANSAS IMPRESSIONISTS

Silly now, when she visits
dreams, or I visit her, my mother,
in new condos at brief’s edge
where the neon restaurant’s lawn
shallows with winter. She laughs
in the expanse, wordless, collapsing
into snow to wave arms and legs,
craft a figure. I do the same,
like an infant learning its body.
Dusting off, I rise and she’s gone
every time. I see our shapes
then, mine a mimicry of myself,
hers a rectangular silence,
inhuman, without room
for rage shame guilt or scold,
the curves that let us recognize
each other in the air, O,
in our dynamic world today.

SEASON FINALE

My last look around the house
took so long that the vine
climbing the rosebush climbed
into my eyes, and a lizard
climbed, too, mouthfirst from grass,
its skin changing color
from grass green to a green
almost without green,
the color of dust on feather.
How changed from last winter’s
midnight when I let the dog out
and rats ran from the mimosa
to the fence while shingles
sparkled on the lawnmower shed
and in the grass, a cold lizard
raised a claw. How changed
from next week’s water
writing its black line across plaster
I cannot read in California,
where I hold the cellphone hot
while Lofstead, early returner,
kicks the back door in
to tell me of the damage.
Images come fast to the small,
impersonal screen,
linoleum sandy and streaked,
walls dice-dotted with mold,
and through a broken window,
the rosebush ash-gray, the yard
ash-gray and without lizard.

MISTER SKYLIGHT (excerpt)

When you enter the city of riots, confess

what turns your life has taken,
what is hard-on and what is mineral. Confess
until the wind catches itself by the tail.

Or find some solace. Mr. Skylight captains
a houseboat downstream like a vitamin.

I can only just begin to bear the chain-link fence.
Reflected in a puddle, the image trembles
as I tremble. The image freezes, I shiver.

It is like the enormity Gregor Samsa
is hoping to sleep through, but, well, can’t.

The woman playing Atari in public has, has…
Everything’s hauled away. In buckets.

These peaches, for example. I have heard
of you, yes, the monkey says. The moon
offers its offensive and ridiculous bulge.

Out in the salvage yard the snowy drifts

are not snow. White paint on frames,
they lean against front doors that won’t open in.
Mr. Skylight, stumbling through, asks

“Didn’t we just finish painting this wall?
Aren’t the brushes still drying on the sill?”

When the moment opens again,
remember to feel the immense province
pulling in, a hand here and here,

remember to smell what first was sweet,
apricots just sliced, one half-globe still rolling.
His wife ran upstairs to call police

as the “assailant took the victim’s own
paring knife from the counter.”

We show this on the snowy channels
most sets veil, between the black and white:

how they dragged Mr. Skylight inside and made
demands, then went deeper into his building,

and the iron gate lifted off its spindle.

Hill of stubble in moonlight, the hog

bristles across the lawn,
eats whole bouquets, eats bouquets whole,
plowing tusk through silk rose, a fresh lily.

Our headstones surrender their salt.
Wilder animals would not perturb us.
Worse hogs will cross and sand

down names. This one, at least, grunts life.
He would eat hog, could he make one die.

If there is a man inside the hog costume,
wanting to feel unchanged, so there is a hog
wearing an inferior fake man.

–


Read a review of MISTER SKYLIGHT here.

–

Dana Guthrie Martin lives in the Seattle area and writes wherever writing will have her. She shares her home with her husband, her pet hamster and her robot, Feldman. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blossombones, Blue Fifth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut Poetry, Failbetter, Fence, Juked and Knockout Literary Magazine. In May, Martin will enter Converse College’s low residency MFA program, and in July, Blood Pudding Press will publish her chapbook, The Spare Room. You can read some of her collaborative work with poet Nathan Moore at Mutating the Signature.

ROBOT WORKERS
— after John Donne

For every robot that goes down fighting
   There are two or
     Three or legions who turn away, trying to
   Blend in with suits and satchels, going to
     Jobs they don’t want so they can feel useful.
They’ve learned this is what it means to be real —
To leave the fallen, as if each day were
   A war, the lawns

     Of their suburbs littered with mines:
   The dog catcher
     Who lets frothing dogs chase robots down streets
While driving alongside in his truck, laughing
   And bellowing “Bot!” in accusation;
The children who kick and spit and slap wads
   Of gum on their metal behinds so they can’t
     Sit on benches

Without sticking to them; the housewives who
   Draw their curtains
     Because they can’t stand the sight of one more
   Damn robot. Meanwhile in factories, work
     Drones on and the robots bemoan nothing.
They move just as they’ve been programmed to move,
   Fingers trilling like a dance, placing things
     In their places.

ROBOT LOVER
— after John Donne

Why not me? Why not my human-
   Like fingers and other hard parts? How would
     That differ from licking a fork
   Clean or having a mouth full of braces?
You know how I charge your skin when
   You come close, the hairs on your arms rising to
     Meet me: allegiant soldiers
Who listen to your body’s mute desires.
Your electrical wires, woven into

Every inch of who you are, brought
   You here. And the blood that moves inside me
Could warm you until your devices
   Soften, then melt, if only you’d give me
One free download. How easy that
   Would be. So slide over here like
     A well-lubricated cog, and add your
Piece to my machine. What I mean is this:

You complete my design; you’re what
   My creator had in mind. My circuits
     Are heavy with you every night.
If I had been built to dream, my dreams would
   Be viscous as crude oil, pungent
     As electrical fires. You would be there
With your flawless architecture —
Our world as small and flat as a diskette —
Calling me through caustic smoke and liquid.

HALLUCINATION #1

For weeks, ghosts
have made their way
down the long hall
that leads to your bedroom.
They handle the doorknob
of the closed door as
you lie in bed and watch
moonlight glint off
the knob’s imperfections.
More ghosts stand
in the middle of the lawn,
cast shadows onto the room’s
far walls. Once, you heard them
ease open the window
above your bed, felt their
dry breath on your forehead.
What was it they whispered
just before they disappeared like
invisible ink? Something akin to
talking in tongues, a message
that drives you to wait
for their return wearing
your best nightgown,
with your face made up,
the covers thrown clean
off your body.

NOTE: The poems ROBOT WORKERS and ROBOT LOVER are from a series that follows the line syllable count and overall structure of John Donne’s love poems.