If I have to earn some skin
does it have to be new?
Can I recycle my mother’s
wedding dress,
a gallon of blue paint,
the leftover hotel shampoo?
Maybe there’s also something
around me I should return,
the coat I stole from winter
back east, my old feathers,
or the scales I can’t remember
growing in the afternoon.
But, yes, there’s the photograph,
me in a skewed school hat,
oversized boots looking green
in light coming through
the window covered in its skin
of last century’s flowers.
There’s that weird glimmer of hope
or fantasy that now itches
along with the lies I told,
archives falling from my hair,
those ribbons that never stayed put.
If I have to earn some other coat
do I need to still keep warm?
Or shall I unbutton and fold
what’s left, step out of my nerves
and my veins, leave everything
—corpse, crevice, carcass, shell—
but keep my breath for
the impending and tremendous air
that’s beyond howling when
I touch it to my old pelt?
Jill Jones has published eleven full-length books of poetry, including Viva the Real (UQP 2018), shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann 2014) which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015. In 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.