April 8 Poetry Prompt: Skin

Today's prompt is deceptively simple: write about skin.

That's it!

Here are a few poetry and photo examples to motivate you.

Shedding Skin

by Harryette Mullen

Oulling out of the old scarred skin

(old rough thing I don't need now

I strip off

slip out of

leave behind)

I slough off deadscales

flick skinflakes to the ground

Shedding toughness

peeling layers down

to vulnerable stuff

And I'm blinking off old eyelids

for a new way of seeing

By the rock I rub against

I'm going to be tender again

The Moss of His Skin

by Anne Sexton

Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their fathers, apparently as

sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes…--Harold Feldman, 'Children of the Desert'

Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958

It was only important to smile and hold still, to lie down beside him and to rest awhile, to be folded up together as if we were silk, to sink from the eyes of mother and not to talk. The black room took us like a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly. I held my breath and daddy was there, his thumbs, his fat skull, his teeth, his hair growing like a field or a shawl. I lay by the moss of his skin until it grew strange. My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.

Tattoo

by Nick Flynn

You do know, right,

that between the no-

longer & the still- to-come

you are being continually tattooed, inked

with the skulls of everyone

you’ve ever loved—the you & the you

& the you & the you—you don’t sit in a chair, thumb

through a binder, pick a design, it simply

happens each time you bring your fingers to your face

to inhale him back into you . . . tiny skulls, some of us are

covered. You, love, could

simply tattoo an open door, light

pouring in from somewhere outside, you

could make your body a door so it appears you

(let her fill you) are made of light.