"Skin" by Larissa Shmailo

Skin


My tongue is bruised
My nude is creaky
Like a cabbage I sit and wait for you
I stutter like an old gun:
Take me
Know
The fast love of my hair.

Your beady little eyes transfix me
Like rats at the foot of my bed
Your limp pendant wrists still hang on my door
You snicker: Get a grip.

You own too big a piece of me
Your eyes say spare some change and I
Don’t want to I
Take and give no quarter and I’ve
Already cut my hair.

Skin is just sausage we call home.
Skin is just sausage we call home.



- Larissa Shmailo

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Larissa Shmailo is a poet and a translator. Her book In Paran is available from Amazon.com and Small Press Distribution. Her poetry CDs Exorcism and The No-Net World, with music by Bobby Perfect. are available from iTunes and CDBaby. Larissa translated the Russian transrational opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; a DVD of the original English-language production is part of the collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn Museum.