Dear Virgin of Remedies
After Remedios Varo’s painting “Rupture”
Uncloak your lamentations / let fly your defiance
of dictators / shred their orders to annihilate
art / fling them to the winds / let them gather
on the limbs of fig trees / in the limbs
of lovers / tear from the feral forms
of men’s bodies / Catholic sculpted fig leaves /
turn your back / point your toe / step away
from their whispers / of gender convention /
spread your pigment / repair the ruptured
Aboard the Sea Gal, Sea-Legs Wide
She steadies her galley stance, rolls egg noodle dough—
her hip-sway syncs with surf’s rising tide.
Spring lines, tied dockside from bow to bracket,
creak and groan from strain. She lifts the mixture,
re-flours the board, sets the pot to boil. This evening,
her mood, like the moon—full, beaming. Other nights—
a crescent moon—her smile narrows, sharpens,
darkens. When did he stop calling her
his skin-sweet woman? When did she first pull
the knife—the one now slicing pasta strips—threatening
to cut his voice from its box? Like the tide, they ebb
and flow, he at the helm, she down below. Sometimes,
seas ease—ship lines wrapped right save vessels from drift.
But when tensions rise, boat ropes moan, like human throats.
Merna Dyer Skinner is a poet, photographer, and communications consultant living in Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in: Rust + Moth, The Baltimore Review, and Quartet, among others, and three anthologies. Her chapbook, A Brief History of Two Aprons, was published by Finishing Line Press. Merna has lived in six US states and traveled to six continents.