Cover

Note to the Reader on Text Size

I couldn’t see myself at the bottom I woke up on the dirt floor of the old cellar I had new limbs

We recommend that you adjust your device settings so that all of the above text fits on one line; this will ensure that the lines match the author’s intent. If you view the text at a larger than optimal type size, some line breaks will be inserted by the device. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a small indent.

BRUTE

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

2018

Selected by Joy Harjo

Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the Walt Whitman Award is given annually to the winner of an open competition among American poets who have not yet published a book of poems.

BRUTE

POEMS

Emily Skaja

Graywolf Press

Copyright

Copyright © 2019 by Emily Skaja

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

Published in the United States of America

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-55597-835-8

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-835-8

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2019

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947085

Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker

Cover art: Walton Ford, Gleipnir. Image courtesy of Walton Ford and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Dedication

for the women in my life

& for anyone vulnerable to flight

BRUTE

I: MY HISTORY AS

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?

—ANNE CARSON

MY HISTORY AS

In my history, I was bones eating paper

or I was paper eating bones. Semantics.

I lived in a narrow house;

I lived with a man who said

You fucked up your own life, who said

I could never love someone so heavy.

The place was brick on brick

with iron grates covering the windows—

rowhouse cage, South Philly. I was learning

how some of us are made to be carrion birds

& some of us are made to be circled.

Somewhere in this education

I stopped eating. Held up my hands

to see if my bones would glow in the dark.

My boat name could have been

HMS Floating, Though Barely.

Meanwhile I had a passion for cartography.

Not leaving, just coloring the maps.

I covered all the walls with white paint, whiter paint, spiraling out—

a weather system curling over water.

I always drew the compass rose flat.

I was metal-blue, I was running my mouth

like a bathtub tap. A bone picked clean of particulates.

Everything has some particular science.

By its nature, a vulture can’t

be a common field crow, for instance.

Look at the wings, look at that hard

mouth, look at the feet.

When I tell my history, I can’t leave out

how I hit that man in the jaw,

that I wasn’t good at mercy,

that eating nothing but white pills & white air

made me unchartable—

I can’t skip to the end just to say

well it was fragile & I smashed it

& everything’s over, well now I know things

that make me unlikely.

What am I supposed to say: I’m free?

I learned to counter like a torn edge

frayed from the damp. That’s how I left it.

Leaving the river, leaving

wet tracks arrowed in the brush.

BRUTE STRENGTH

Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman

written out of my own story, I’ve been trying

to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash

back to my beginning, that girlhood—

kite-wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds

tearing out from under the hickories

all those fine August mornings so temporary

so gold-ringed by heat haze & where is that witch girl

unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt

of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn’t let a boy hit her,

girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide

heavy around her like a flag? Let me look at her.

Tell her on my honor, I will set the wedding dress on fire

when I’m good & ready or she can bury me in it.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP WHITE MOTHS

from flying out of my mouth.

I am 25. I paint the door blue. I go in when he tells me

to stay out. Next to a billboard

in Philadelphia that says Your Message Here,

I am sewn into a dress. On Broad Street, ravens

lurk on the Divine Lorraine Hotel as if to say

Always a corpse flower, never a bride.

Facing south, I can make myself apologize

for anything. My voice is thick—a shroud of bells.

But will I listen. What I hear in the dark

is my own blood stalking me

like a drunk boy wild on cheap gin

swinging his hammer

to nail a tree swallow flat to a barn door.

A bird is a vessel. It carries a field.

There are nights when I sleep on the couch

& lift macramé lace to my cheek from a hope chest.

Outside, a teenager shoots a teenager shoots a teenager.

The cops come to measure the street.

They ask me What did you see? I saw a hole in the whole of the picture.

When he comes home late from his fight at the bar,

I hold a cold rag steady to his knuckles. I think I can love someone

who cares enough to bruise for me.

He touches his thumb to the corner of my mouth,

pulls back my lip to consider my teeth.

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.

ELEGY WITHOUT A SINGLE TREE I CAN SAVE

I’ve been standing all night in the woods near Necedah with your name etched in red on my tongue like a box-elder wing. Loss of life occurred at a specific hour, a certain day, we are told. No one was with you—how that weighs on me. That there can be no untwisting of the tree back into its seed. Innocent of all charges. Granted just one reprieve. Has there ever been anyone more false than I am, pretending I know which one is a white pine against white stars? Shouldn’t I remember which of these is the tree you climbed, which of these you were too afraid to come down from? I think you were the first person to say Cassiopeia to me. As young as we were, we could not carry a ladder out here by ourselves. Alone, I watch the water move now like a clock someone is winding with a knife. I am starved for that easy taxonomy of Things Before. For the years not likely to be cut open with scissors only to find proof of disease. Black hair spooling from the lungs of each month since. You’re gone & I collect fox fur by myself in every direction. You’re gone & I misname the trees.

IN MARCH WHEN YOU TELL ME YOU DON’T

I walk in a straight line as a compass pulled the wrong way north.

High Priestess of the Not-Quite. Chief Dolorous. And fuck it all—

All of it. Unobserved, clement.

Being the one who—being the one that—–

I have the problem of needing to say my history teeth-first to a body

of water—to the river, to the gutter, to the storm drain red & rushed

with leaves in dirty water on the way to your apartment maybe

I should give up the story that what I say can change it

notwithstanding one for, one against your cowardice

notwithstanding halfwinter light torn up wet-white & eyeless

& I know I should sky up birdward—I know I should circle high

until my arms are kited cramped but can I see you

plainly or at all from any height do I know how

to see you I do but I don’t & I can’t

find you on a March night moonless on the hill where I know you

are out walking the treeline slowly with your dog.

Tell me               if I can make the not-moon intercede—

If I can come south as a figure wearing starlings as a coat

If I can be If I can be If I can be

a tunnel either leafing or branching or——

If I can be If I can be If I can be

[IN DEFEAT I WAS PERFECT]

In defeat I was perfect

the luster & the grime on me irresistible

Bright landscape with the sky blacked out

A spectacle      I was tied into the clothesline drunk

In my defense    every arrogant green thing

had been blooming against my directive

I remember      the light was pressing me down toward myself

the trees were thick with insects

dark birds shadowed the street

I had been circling hungry red & narrow not

slogging through the mud

like the Magellan of any promised thing

He was leaving in arrows      he walked out

in a boldfaced lie      I said You need to consider me

Consider all that            considering the future

I had thrown into orbit

There was a truck piled neatly with boxes

He had a splintered voice that he hid from me

Is it giving up if you give what you have

& the universe still fucks you

Now I can’t picture his face anymore      only leaves

I remember I was desperate to speak

to expose the right language

Understand he kept driving back to me

& back to me      He said I didn’t always

love you        He said I didn’t want to tell you

to wait for me                  (But wait for me)

ELEGY WITH A SHIT-BROWN RIVER RUNNING THROUGH IT

Never have I ever let anyone skin me alive for my secrets. I grow true to seed. Unfamiliar with traditions of marksmanship. Whose grouse it is. Whose grouse I am after I fall. In this hayfield I say nothing at all to the hornets. I admire their mud huts. I think only in lists. The Time I Told You to Give Up Smoking. The Time I Believed You Would Live to Be Older Than Seventeen. When I think about all the ways there are to die. By falling ice. In a coat-check. With a gallon of ethanol stale in your gut. I am dizzy. I am missing your way of blinking at me in the sun. Bus tickets seep out of my pockets. By the river I drop a tree branch shaped like a tibia. In the center of my hand is a hole. I am used to it. Of course there is shouting. There is nothing I can get behind less than drunk huntsmen observing male rituals with gusto. I would rather look at the river through the burned-out circle of my hand. Somewhere in here is a fish with a hook in its mouth—I’m sure of it.

PHILADELPHIA

—city of hot pavement

addressed by hot pavement,

boiling puddles studded

with floating syringes, paper kites.

A bridge swung over the water

with direction, like a fist.

All the time he was trying to show me

how he was a stuck door

with an eyehole punched through

where I saw only

gashes of light.

Brute. He locked me out.

I walked 3rd Street

all the way north.

The day’s interminable heat.

Sweat tore up my thighs.

Cherry trees, I remember,

were blooming

shamefully.

It was a house I was always

walking back to.

I wasn’t delicate.

The door was blue.

So it was

that the palm of my hand

held a red bruise

shaped like a bird.

A lit crow. Flamed.

How sharp it is

to be wrong-fledged.

To be rope ravel

winging out

of syncopation.

Tried trying.

Just once I wanted

to hit & hold the person

who could hit & hold

me down.

I wanted the bruise

& the voice that was sorry.

Terror to give up control—

terror to name it.

There was a bottle.

There was a bottleneck exit.

THE BRUTE / BRUTE HEART

After Pennsylvania, I couldn’t breathe.

—LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

The facts are: I drove all night through the mountains to get away from him

I cut up my credit cards to prove I would not leave him

I woke up in the hospital

to bonesaw / brushfire / thralldom

the pieces were out of order there was glass in my cheek

I tried to swallow an entire bottle I tried to leave

without giving away my name I was not lost

I listed no forwarding address

There was a reason why I named the dog Valor

If I was silent I’d learned the virtue

of protecting my mouth at least

I was going home

to the house between the cemeteries

to the redbud the willow trees

the heavy muck-wet woods

I loved & in my absence

the house had been torn down

to make more space

for the dead

I stood there breathing

It felt like

sliding a hand through loose dirt looking

for tendrils & pockets of air

It’s easy to be angry

about how much hope there is

in reaching

The whole house gone

& so many little monuments

to the wrong thing

In the bare yard

all of my good trees

still framed the hole

where the house had been standing

In my new life whatever I claimed

I didn’t feel it was mine

How easily I could be a river dragged

a gray car raised up from the bottom dripping

Already I was on a string I could be lurched up

out of hiding & the evidence tagged

He took the money he said I made him crazy it was my fault

What was wrong with me how could I ever think

I could leave was I really so stupid he said

he would call the police

he set my furniture on fire he said

he would drive my dog to the pound if I went out

I’d like to say now that he was just a list of grievances

Who else would try so hard on someone so fucking worthless

is some kind of war proposal

that no longer works on me

What I want is a permanent figure

I want a marker here to separate

The Time Before from The Time Now

One ivied-over angel

for a woman with no known name & no known history

A monument for the disappearance of X

for the opening of a deep well in which I would tread water

for the blood to tide

for the trees to fall

for 100 years of winter

II: GIRL SAINTS

To assess the damage is a dangerous act.

—CHERRÍE MORAGA

GIRL SAINTS

O LORD, when the Angel said Listen

when the Angel said Do not fall to the earth for anyone

we were already stained in glass.

A circle of black flies biting

our arrival. Scales scraped off of a fish.

Starved girls folded at a line from Leviticus.

This is how it happened: one day we looked outside

& the bloated bodies of frogs were fucking up the yard.

Our hands bled. We saw Rorschach blood in our wounds,

Pietà in egg yolks. There was a hope chest & a threshold

& a bridegroom—revoltingly pagan. We said

Bring us the coat-check ticket for our eyes.

Nothing was so underpaid as our attention.

If ghost, if whore, if virgin—same origin story:

because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake.

Our sisters said Wait. Our mothers said Stay the hell awake.

We bled on our white clothes—we bore them redly

to the table. Our fathers said Tell me, will you ever

feed me something that isn’t your own trouble?

We cast away stones. There was room at the inn.

There was time to be floated as witches.

When night came, an egg-moon slid over the steeple.

We stared at the blue yolk yawning in the fire.

Our Father. Who Art in Heaven.

There were men in the alley. We knew them by name.

They said they wanted to prove we were holy.

Your Angel said Listen—

There are not vultures enough

in this world, there are not crows

to shoot out of the sky in a shaking black line.

Please, we’ve been trying

to say out loud the words for this—

to see You write it out red

in a fish-hooked curve. Have mercy—

Mouth of Poison Flowers: Speak.

Mouth of Asphodel—Say it.

DEAR KATIE

Understand I need these fragments. To tell it once is not enough.

I have a hundred holy objects, everything looked upon, to break.

Time will pass, time will pass me, attaching mile-marker threats

to every causeway. I know it’s useless. I put on every eyeliner I own.

I draw the shape—a different eye to see this. I map the innocent

spill of color to my ear. Look, I’m already half an emerald. Lit & limited, I’m

cut. Now that I can’t unsmudge the lines for any reason, I am difficult.

He takes the high road; I take the thornhedge.

Katie, I can’t find a way to talk about this

but it always happens: I have no standing with the men in my life.

You are the only one who ever asks me Are you eating?

Come close, too close, get out—it’s a blunt-edged system

& when did I begin to choose this type of man who loves to “protect” me

from himself? Lately, I hold your name in my mouth

like a talisman because we are never afraid of the same things.

Remember the dead dog we found on the bridge road. A coyote, I said.

Raised as I was near a cemetery, I always assume some authority

over the departed. Stray magic. Lies about the natural world

comfort me, I admit. Like if a tree feels something

when another tree is fucking up her life. I believe in patterns. Shapes.

Pinnate, whorled. I remember too the accordion doors of the Blue Line train

& the way it spit me out piss-drunk on the O’Hare platform crying

because I wasn’t sure if I’d hit him or if I’d only wanted to.

I was trying to starve myself out of a feeling. Signals & timelines.

& if the train comes out of the tunnel before I count to ten

then I’m not the most fucked thing. & if not, then when.

My own mouth bleeding is a nice round number.

On your couch I fall asleep with puke in my hair & I dream

that I’m trapped in a water tower. Katie, I wake up saying.

ELEGY WITH FEATHERS

When you’re gone I press my hand to the stove just once. Patches of blisters pearl on my palm. I have sense enough to put on my coat. On the boat I am called Red. I take every other phrase from an elocution book. I wear a high collar that rubs against my cheek & in the rain it leaves a scratch raised like a welt. I pretend not to know why you’re gone, pretend there is not the same sickness inside me. I try to explain about the curse for which the cure is not thinking. On the fourth day, notes on a disaster include water & water. A man on the boat follows me all day, just one question then I’ll leave you alone. There is nowhere a girl can go that a man like this won’t have a question. A trade he feels owed. There’s a hole in his glove & the skin underneath is peeled raw. A teakettle boils on the wind. Help me. On my knees I ask to be turned into a gull. I shift into white gloss, feathers.

DEAR RUTH

Anyone can be a plank-mouthed bird or anyone can be the sky hallelujah

is the accepted lie of hymns. Like a girl walking has never needed to fly

but could if she wanted. If winged & if the wings fit—if fielded, if felt.

What is the difference between asking & asking for it are the words

that we should burn into a field, Oh Glory. Whether you are lost

or whether you are the blondest bird leaned against a fence

hemming in an orchard, Ruth, you are the holy thing I look to.

So explain to me about the habits of cicadas, why only the men

speak, why it takes some of them 17 years to come correct.

All the leaves are eaten bare; yet the tree is not empty, we know

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!