The Darling Skin (Anthology)
Stephanie Powell
(she/her)
This collection of six poems finds the body in different places, in the buildings and motorways of a city, in nature, at home, in new places and familiar ones – in statis, moving, changing, revolving around the interchangeable idea of the body and the self, especially as we get older.
I’ve always had an interest in how people live and change in spaces over time. How they interact with each other. I use the medium of poetry to explore this. My work is deeply personal, but I hope it also speaks to a gnawing sense of place that follows all of us around.
The darling skin
Soft, the darling skin-
the low, low valley, where-
I’d stop to watch you walk,
where you’d trip and boil down into the soil.
Look up into the faces of the Yorkshire fog,
the cocksfoot, the common grass.
Ants’ tracing loops along the nape
of your ankles, eventually I’d kiss
the tissue that grows back.
Find all my rage after midnight-
Bless you, bless you, bless you.
Shiver off the sheets, rest my head where
your feet would lay, check over our arms for
melanomas, hug you tightly,
our darling skin an origami of folds.
The last one
The mandarin, left-lastly in the net,
broken webbing-
sitting amongst the garlic skins and loose rice in the draw,
full of
flesh and vein,
like mum’s kumquats on the front porch.
The stairs up to her terrace bent,
sunburnt brick.
Lately: all the roads you’ve lived in
start and end on the gravel of this
driveway.
Each doorbell a punched note
through imagined flyscreens.
Listen: the sex
in the next room of the share-house
penetrates the drywall
as you are trying to sleep.
On another night, reach across
the seat to find a hand as taxi wheels
tip across the Thames-
drunk-headed,
a city goes by the windows.
Kissed on the tube at midnight,
a mouth breathes into you the new year, southern comfort
and coke-
the doors open
and it’s two thousand and sixteen.
The mandarin still holds its sweetness,
though it has softened- it
cannot match the thighs of
twenty-somethings
checking for Ubers at three am.
In another morning a child’s face ripples all the way through
the Saturday markets.
Turning around to stare,
pulled forward against the crowd.
Youth looks bluntly back,
as it does-
the fruit can no longer be eaten,
it has been there too long.
It must
be left in statis, to preserve or rot through.
Disconnect
the afterbirth clung to the baby,
the colour of the
rings of Saturn.
thick and curled, the cord
lay against its ear,
ready to call-collect
the evacuated basin, to let
its arrival be known.
emerging milk-hungry-
sopping in thirst and foam
old numbers forgotten in thin past,
as guided to soft tit-
the light breaking up the earth.
Two drinks.
He makes two drinks, the ice naps against the glass. A quarter past three and his throat hurts as though traced by a scalpel. The rain comes down outside, hard. The downpour froths out the drain mouth. He lights a cigarette, smokes it down, lights another one- stares out the window a little longer. Someone has put on a slow song, loving you baby, it ain’t an easy kind of love. End of the party music. The voices in the other room sound wet, as though he were lying in a bath, ears under the water. The world remains utterly outside them. The failing afternoon sky, the strangers walking past the front windows. Inside, the room is pinned down by blue smoke, it muffles the figures sat close on the floor. He can hear the houseplants struggling to breathe. The ice has disappeared, he takes a sip, stretches the skin around his eyes, puts the glass down, doesn’t yet think of going to bed.
New world
Who’s there? A question mark of unsealed state road, our new car-
our first shared thing.
Swarm of dust and stone at the rear window.
In the passenger seat you are taking photos of it all with virgin eyes, how knotted and unending it seems even to me. Double-exposed eucalypts and fence posts, speeding scenery. How we edge our way along this ridge at the breath of something beautiful and life-taking.
Is this your version of Australiana?
The towns passed by,
elderly main streets-
the hotel, the Anglican church, the general store- tricked out, fancified
The bushland, steel windmills, covered verandas, stacks of wheat rolled up like liquorice, red parrots punctuating the sky.
I am waiting for you to say, here it is, this is it,
exactly how I imagined it.
I am no longer the ex-pat. I’m watching
while you are leaning back,
learning a new vocabulary-
my hands at the wheel
and we are going fast, but we could say, somewhere here it is,
somewhere here we are.