Skin in Game
It isn’t easy giving
your skin to someone
to hold, even for
a minute, even if she
gives you her skin, or
the bones of her inner
ear without blinking.
You can’t hear
without those bones,
you need someone
to intuit winds
closing in. Without
skin you feel too
much this buffeting,
the way grasses,
flaming, die back,
the way a solitary
mare through green
fields moves,
the way the field
moves through you.
Crossing
He walks like a condemned man,
putting one sprig of green
in front of a blizzard.
Mostly he travels by night,
in dreams, to not be seen.
By day he hangs out
with other condemned men—
they eat, they laugh, play cards.
Tomorrow they will tell
their condemned women
how the hours, like yellow
tulips to light, bend toward them.
Experimental
He builds the birds
from wings he has
around the house,
the cage from bread
he bakes. He means
to see how long the birds
might take to eat
a way out, how long,
not knowing the ways
of the wild, to fly
back, and in what
forlorn and minor
key, for their stale
cage, sing.
Blizzard
All night plows plow.
Snows snow. Lovers
somewhere somehow love.
What purity: doing what
you are. I listen to the bone
soup brewing: not the proper
way to savor the savory.
Let’s study weather
weathering, balloons
ballooning. The weather
balloon sent up says
which way winds
howl & how fast. I’m
trying to put my mouth
around the idea of
you. It’s an awkward
task—like the dog
bringing slippers
to his legless master.
Andrea Cohen’s sixth book, Nightshade, is due out this year by Four Way Books. Her last book is Unfathoming. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Writers House at Merrimack College.Read poetry by Andrea Cohen previously appearing in Terrain.org: seven poems and four poems.
Header photo by Creative Travel Projects, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Andrea Cohen by Adrianne Mathiowetz.
