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).
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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