Judith Skillman

Another Childhood

Trees turn black, first bat comes 
for a lawn chair, grazing its high back.
A stick flies toward heaven to attract 
the next bat, a father’s voice calls. Mother
stands on her porch. Leaves lift & settle.
A hot one, they say, & turn sprinklers on.
Droplets spatter halters, arms & legs.
We skip rope, roller skate, climb trees
until the sun heads red-angry to bed. 
September stands like a word inscribed
in cedar chips. Hares & squirrels watch us.
We’re worse than bad. The whole lot
empty until afternoon, after
we do arithmetic, vocab, escape
the fluorescent prison where we learn
to be alike, when in fact none of us know
how little time we have. Susan least of all,
Stephen with his arm in a cast, Ellen
whose mother died when she was five.

I See How It Happened

They were tired of watching robins 
in a winter of more than three months, 
they’d given up trying to make from chicken thighs 
a feast to outlast their vague hunger. 
The newspapers could be mistaken
for something else since afternoons
paraded in used clothes, worn record grooves 
held the sound of jazz.
Sun shone through spattered panes. 
Each house stood silent as usual.
No stone lions guarded splintered porches.
A grand fatigue (or was it malaise?) 
visited their kitchens. Bread cost twice 
what it had a week ago. Mother 
could not venture out due to black toe. 
The fatigue of German whispers, rumors—
no details, only statements, and how
could anything quite so bad come to pass?
No, simply, the cheeses were too soft,
habits too strong to break away from 
in the sudden swiftness that took them 
to camps in the countryside. There,
coaxed by a bar of soap, they 
went naked to shower beneath faucets of gas.

Back to Issue XII…