Two Poems by Jeff Skinner

Insomnia

Walking the Mobius strip, sleep just up ahead, on the other side. I have a strong sense of self, which I lose track of easily and often. The dark gets all up in my face. I can see a little through my daughter, but most of the future’s socked in by fog. Thoughts slide out before I can write them down. I’ll have them in the next world, & some will still be stupid. If salvation depended on the social life I’d be damned. My mother keeps asking to go home, but when I ask which home she can’t say—not where it is, or was, or when. At some point, wide–eyed, everyone whispers, OK death, show me what you got.

The Nighthawk

I go back to warn the guy I used to be. But when I get there he looks tired, eating alone in the diner. He’s just come from the four-to-twelve shift. And I can’t bring myself to touch his arm, or speak. Besides, it’s clear I’m not much of anything to him—a spot of ketchup on his tie, a shadow passing through the parking lot. He chews, looking straight ahead, beer in hand, cigarettes and zippo on the formica counter. And still so much night left to go.

Jeffrey Skinner is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry.  His most recent book of poems, Chance Divine, won the Field Poetry Prize and was published in 2017.  I Offer This Container, his New & Selected Poems, was also published in 2017, by Salmon Poetry. In 2015 Skinner was given an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in writing.  He has published six previous collections of poems, and is currently President of the Board of Directors and Editorial Consultant for Sarabande Books, a literary publishing house he founded with his wife Sarah Gorham.