I’m intrigued by the tension in Jake Skeet’s poem: the title juxtaposes love with death, and the rhythms press against the nettle-like images. The images of the first stanza are drawn and rough with “blackberry and sage”, “bottles” and the “cirrhosis moon”, but the lines sound like a nursery rhyme (the first two lines are perfectly trochaic and the third is iambic). Many other lines in this poem are also iambic or trochaic, but the subject matter is disturbing. And the frequent use of monosyllabic words (the entire first line is monosyllabic, as are several others) creates a sort of hammering, unadorned tone. Selected by Victoria Chang
Love letter to a corpse
By Jake Skeets
on our backs in blackberry and sage
bottles are ringing us awake
cirrhosis moon for eye
coughed up fists
we set ourselves on fire
copy our cousins
made up in black smoke
pillar dark in June
Drunktown gets the letters in their name
lost to the bone
horses graze where their remains are found
and you kiss me to silence me
my breath bruising dark in the depth
leaves replace themselves with meadow larks
cockshut in larkspur
ghosts rattle bottle dark and white eyes
horses still hungry
there in the weeds
Victoria Chang’s fifth book of poems, “Obit” (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was named a DailyExpertNews Notable Book and a Time Must-Read. Her nonfiction book, “Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief,” was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University. Jake Skeets is a Navajo Nation poet and the author of “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers” (Milkweed Editions, 2019). He received the Whiting Award in Poetry 2020, among others, and teaches at Diné College.
