« Rachel Bunting » From His Side Catalog it. Write it down: compare my tongue to a scalpel and expound on how it wounds you, slices open your skin with a swift slash. Describe my face, tell all those who read your poems that it’s a face you have tried – and failed – to love for what it lacks. Use metaphors, make me a weasel, a boar, the snake who slithers at your feet, binds your ankles and holds you here. Call yourself a war-zone refugee, a broken soldier finally going home. Whatever you do, don’t include the rest of the truth: you are the one who left; you closed the door. I was here, waiting, wanting, waiting. Breaking the Skin Our words stretch around us like a skin, fold us into a small dark space – so small I can’t see how close you are to me. But I feel your hot breath in the air, hanging like fruit just ripened and headed toward rot. I am longing now for us to drop to the firm earth, split open and leak out what’s turned sour. But you cling to the branch, unwilling to let go and sow yourself into something new. What’s to come is the part I thought we’d avoid: the division of our life into sections, the picking through all we didn’t want to know about ourselves and the resentful seeds nestled deep within. Skin is mostly just a shield, a way to shut inside what no one wants to see. I begin by peeling away this thick integument. I will not rot inside a skin that no longer fits; our words will not hold. Haunted House And now the knocking begins in my body. Joan Larkin, “Jew in Paris” See these teeth: aged planks that hide my words. Pry them open one by one to find the syllables I have choked on over the years, collected there in the closet like moldy robes: mother, failure, marriage, compromise. What about the eyes? Two moss-covered gates always opening, never closing. I cannot lock them, though I have tried; the garden has run wild. Now hands and fingers, deft louvres that swing shut against the promise of foreign skin. I do not lead to nowhere. These bones are not rusted hinges creaking in useless jambs. Tock, tock. Do you hear that? I am inhabited, lonely as I look. If you knock, you must come in. Rachel Bunting is a born and bred South Jersey girl who is currently learning to live outside the Pine Barrens. Her poems can be found in Edison Literary Review, Mad Poets Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets and the online journals Wicked Alice and The Barefoot Muse. She is a dedicated fan of British bands from the 80s and is a terrible dancer.