A Whole Night, by Susan Skeele

Breaking the Vicious Circle, by Remedios Varo (Mexico, b, Spain) 1962

A Whole Night

I live in the lining of your cloak.
I am the spaces between the thread and the satin-
tiny blacknesses where the needle entered
and the thread couldn’t fill.

In my last lifetime, I was a fly on your skin
and the time before that,
a drop of spit in your butter.

After all I have learned,
you would think I would
be born as
your door latch,
your water faucet,
the hand of the barber who cuts
the hair on your chin.

But through all those lifetimes,
I was not waking up-
I was only becoming more vigilant

Inhabiting space like a taut question mark, 
reluctant mathematician,
desperate seamstress 

calculating 

force of your footfall + number of times your key fumbles in the metal lock
 x distance fumes extend from your hot mouth
- number of steps before you fall down on the wooden floor 
= number of breaths I can take until I have to stitch us back up again

This is what you hate most-
for all the weight you throw in the world, all the folds of your flourish and sway, promising protection--
you cannot hide from me the empty body underneath, cannot fill the tiny blacknesses with anything but me

That I’m able to think at all
is a kind of awakening

asking

Next time, could I live as the hawk that crouches, hunched against the wind?
Could I be the hooded eyes that watch me?
Not be distracted by the sky breaking apart and rearranging? 
Next time, could I wait for the moment to pounce and carry 

the shivering mouse
up off the earth to a high branch
to devour it,
crunch its bones?

make a paste of its parts
for my babies?

This is what I want to happen to my fear
once and for all:
Let it be eaten by something noble,
something inhuman-
that only hunts to live.

Once and for all
let me pull on the thread that binds us,
and from a great unraveling
let me knit the tiny blacknesses

into a whole night
where no one knows you

where yours is not even a name
that anything can be called by.

Susan Skeele

​Susan Skeele is an American poet, writer and MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In 2024, she received Mozaik Philanthropy's Future Art Writers Award, and is collaborating on a book-length project with fellow student and award-winning visual artist Badri Valian on the subject of their childhoods in Vermont and Iran. She lives in Oakland with Riley, Yuki and Nick (dog, cat, cat).