Not Verb, but Vertigo

          —after Alejandra Pizarnik
 
 
A yellow scraping across my skin when
I write the word “sky”
 
Not sky but scything :
  	to let day be scraped out
        	 by night
 
I scratched down the word “flower” & felt
   the parts draw away from the tongue.
  	Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost :
        	to gnaw on the crisp
                    	skin once it’s been stripped
                    	down from the meat
 
the neat meat
 
hiding under the table
of the skin’s
tablatures
 
right at the juncture where day/night meet
you can see it indicated by the perforated lines
 
what parts of us that don’t cast a shadow

Copyright © 2018 by Eleni Sikélianòs. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.