Skin

My skin is a sewn-shut bag. It holds all of me in. Inside my skin I am acid toes and hurricane belly and fire hands and buzzing bee lips on a tornado head. Would all those things stay together outside my skin? I don’t think so. My father’s skin is my favorite. Even as it fades and empties with time, I can see the map of what it has held etched into his many lines. I see sharp red rocks in his feet and steel in his chest and music in his shoulders that dance in the car when the music comes out of his mouth. Some tribes once ate their dead, welcoming them into a new skin to find rest. Did they absorb the storms? Did they pass along windy screaming rage and monsoon grief to blow around in that new skin? Maybe this is why your skin is so soft. Your ancestors did not give you their broken glass hearts. Your skin is like the skin on top of the pudding my grandma used to cook that I could cut with a spoon. Your skin is like the skin on a peach, fuzzy and easy to tear. Are you sweet inside like pudding and peaches? Is your skin filled with sunlight and new grass? What will you collect with age besides dust? I will grow vines around my ribs, ones with flower blooms and thorn scratches. I will spit out my throat rocks so that my tongue can dance on your ears. I will boil my blood until it smells like courage and I will drink my tears until they taste like peace. I will thunder out a new skin, and I will show the new skin how to fill itself with stars and rich earth and barbed wire. When my skin is cold and empty the new skin will write on my grave what it saw in the skin of its mother, as I will for my father. My skin is filled with gunfire and secret whispers, and I will wear my skin like silk armor while it holds back the avalanche that would bury me too soon.

Lindsey lives in a place that is usually cold. She loves plants but cannot keep a succulent alive. She has two dogs, three rabbits, and a husband. She used to be an archaeologist, but now she works in a construction office and writes odd stories. In her leisure time she enjoys reading and upon her death would prefer to be terramated.