Three poems by Ellen Skilton

"Too Small," "Two-step," and "Model Minority Cliffs"

Too Small

Empty box 
wants full.
Muscles
stretch,
bones set.
Cave, dark.

No calories, 
more long
for more. 
Foot dragged, 
too small 
to play.

Cannot
imagine
carcass, 
the trail, 
eaten.
No tears. 

Syntax 
of loss 
swallows
absence,  
cellar 
grief.
 

Photo by Hans Eiskonen

Two-step

                                                  
A tropical cyclone transforms the highway
into a canal, while imaginary gondolas
navigate the wreckage, skim the surface.
 
I swim as fast as I can toward you when
I hear your floatation device is faulty,
but you might mend it yourself, if I let you.
 
Rowhome basements full of sediment,
family photos bob with driftwood,
an awkward mother/daughter two-step.
 
You can dance in a hurricane,
but only If you’re standing in the eye.
 
I remember a full-of-hopes ocean,
a lake with shores out of sight.
Today, just a dumpster full of rain.
 
And I keep hitting the rusty metal walls,
wanting to make you swim farther, faster —
my empathy, a false god, a lifeguard mirage.

I can’t save you, even if I feel it all. 
This is your swim test. 
                                                    		 
Water crests over bridges, flooding
mildewed lullabies, devastating past storms.
Trees topple and cars take flight. 
 
Warning sirens plead with me to run.

Model Minority Cliffs

The karsts of Kampong
Trach Mountain have been
mined to oblivion for postwar
construction, endangering archival 

terrain, false cactuses and animal spirits. 

Your parents fled over mountains. 

                                                                             We are complicit in your dust and pain. 
While you hold losses like
glimmering promises, 
I meet you in your new
home so far from home. 

Khmer parents in Philadelphia say, 

You are bad children.   
                                                                                 You don’t know how good you have it.   
And the kids
(eating chicken nuggets)
respond, Oh yeah,
Khmer Rouge, whatever.  

Five girls ask for flower-girl-status, 

Ellen and Paul sittin’ in a tree, they say.
                                                                             It’ll be just like the wedding on Full House. 
She’s on the barefoot 
and pregnant track,
her teacher says.  
HE IS SO WRONG. 

She says, I wore thrift store crazy 

colors. The other kids say,
                                                                              How come you never match?

We are not fiction, we say.
              
              We are real blood, breath, bones.

                           These cliffs, those cliffs

                                             are not our homes.

---

Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in Literary Moma, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Scapegoat Review, and The Dillydoun Review. In addition to being a poet, she is an educational anthropologist, an applied linguist and a Fringe Fest performer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University. She is also an excellent napper, a chocolate snob, a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia with a dog named Zoomer, a cat named Katniss and some lovely humans.