I am pointless. This I come to knowby pressing ear to night’s machinery.Outside, the words rub each otheruntil they are dull: calibrate, resurface,surface, invest, investigate, snowy, open,environ, woman, wooden, system.I look where little nodes of language cling,lichen-like, to what will have them.The air framed beyond the high windowis an invitation. I could grab something.Sample the pie and salad. I could recitewhat I play at knowing, be disassembledby an institution or human person,could get inside a tree and take up positionas one who with her yellow eye stalks form.I didn’t know I was looking for it, but sure,but sure. A chemic silver, a thoughtdarting through another’s wet plumage.Must I convene myself again?And it is mournful, the recognitionof one’s own phrase—a headless fish,width of some finger, writhing,cemented there.
Rose-Crowned Night Girl
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“Rose-Crowned Night Girl” from TANTRUMS IN AIR: by Emily Skillings.
Published by The Song Cave on 24 June, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Emily Skillings.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025), both published by The Song Cave. Skillings’ recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books.
Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.
Emily Skillings’s highly anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry's shining stars of humor, insight, and edge. Skillings writes through various poetic forms, reminding the reader how tenuous the line can be between a poem and, say, an Amazon review of the poet’s first book. Featuring a ballet in four acts ("part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal"), addresses to past loves ("I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open"), and an unconventional treatise on education, Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.
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