Below Zero
The night is freezing, freezing
and thick as velvet, and the little stars
stand out as thin as pins.
The bath is hot and I lower
myself, I sink, beneath the water:
it hurts my skin with its comfort.
I think of how they recommend peeling tomatoes –
I haven’t tried it – dipping
them in boiling water
and I think of my skin peeling
off in great gauzy bundles, revealing
a casing of fat, cool, thick and lardy.
I could take a spoon and pick
and chip and flake and watch the whiteness
fall away in fragments.
Underneath are the nerves and muscles,
dense pulsings of red, like the things
the butcher displays, like those poor flayed corpses.
And underneath, once I unknit, unravel,
those tuberous skeins,
are the clear, clean lines of bone
and housed in those cages are airbags,
a pumping meat-fist,
the mess that I would jettison, cast out.
And it would fly free,
the bird, the breath they call spirit,
fly far above borne up on words of ash.
Kitty Coles’ poems have been nominated for the Forward Prize and Best of the Net. She was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in 2017. www.kittyrcoles.com