- Christine Delea
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.