Tara Skurtu

BRAINS | ECLIPSE
October 24, 2016 Skurtu Tara

BRAINS

 

You didn’t have any

that Sunday afternoon

at the family table—your chain-

smoking father, too weak

to tend his backyard garden,

still masculine enough to want

to rip that necklace from your neck,

in silence he slid the first slice

onto my plate and waited for me

to eat the one thing I told myself

I’d never eat—I swallowed

the bite whole. Here, I was

the foreigner. I was your guest.

 

 

 

 

ECLIPSE

 

The bird moved when I moved.
It was like a klonopin, it slept

between my breasts—opened its eyes
only when I peeked inside my shirt

and let in light.

Tara Skurtu is the author of The Amoeba Game and the upcoming poetry collection Faith Farm. A two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and two Academy of American Poets prizes, she is the founder of International Poetry Circle, a national steering committee member of Writers for Democratic Action, and works as a writing coach. Tara’s recent poems appear in SalmagundiThe CommonThe Baffler, and Poetry Wales.