Richard Siken

“All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity.”

Bare Bones

In the early hours of July 4th, I lay on the floor of my apartment and made another book.

Bare Bones
Edition 1 of 1.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
you belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Summer’s Score

by Summer’s score, I
levelled the ground with a roar
beat upon my chest and tore
rapaciously across the feathered floor
of field, forest, marshland, moor

With a burst and a battle cry, I’m plunging in the sea, flinging my meagre self through the foam, sweeping currents dragging at my feet. I’m hunting down spider webs through the woods, backlit and silver, crowned by her eight legged queen, casting fishing nets by the river with my dad and his deep, brown hands gently untangling and setting free the ones unfit for food, sprinting after butterflies in their erratic flight to find the perfect cradle in the perfect bloom.

A child of salt water and the summer, where I grew wild and barefoot.

Gold Coast | Australia