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I’m intrigued by the tension in Jake Skeet’s poetry: its title juxtaposes love and death, and its rhythms press against stinging nettle-like images. The images of the first stanza are scarred and jagged with “burr and sage,” “bottles,” and “cirrhotic bear,” but the lines sound like a nursery rhyme (the first two lines are purely trochaic and the third iambic). Many other lines in this poem are also iambic or trochaic, but the subject is problematic. And heavy use of monosyllabic words (like the others, the entire first line is monosyllabic) creates a kind of attractive, unadorned tone. Chosen by Victoria Chang
Love Letter to a Corpse
by Jake Skeets
burr and sage on our backs
bottles wake us up
cirrhosis month for eye
fists coughed
we set ourselves on fire
copy our cousins
left in black smoke
column dark in june
Drunktown gets the letters mixed up in their names
lost to the bone
horses graze where their remains are found
and you kiss me to shut me up
my breath is rotten deep in the dark
leaves replace themselves with prairie birds
faucet in larkspur
ghosts rattle bottle dark and white eyes
the horses are still hungry
there in the weeds
Victoria Chang’s His fifth book of poetry, “Obit” (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), has been named a New York Times Highlight and A Must Read. His non-fiction book “Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief” was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Antakya University’s MFA program. Jake Skeets He is a Navajo Nation poet and author of “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers” (Milkweed Editions, 2019). He is the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Prize for Poetry, among other honors, and teaches at Diné College.
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