Skin Poem
  By Devon Miller-Duggan

The tender bits:
eyelids, lips, nipples, cheeks,
earlobes—places where the blood’s
surprised burn escapes. The webby fold
between forefinger and thumb,
the rumpled knuckle-skin—loose, frail parts
we’re born with that won’t change in age.

The toughened bits:
heels, the pen bump on the thumb
the tip of the nose
from poking itself
into others’ secrets,
small scars from old cuts—
easy as geodes to crack open.

The misapprehensions:
By the skin of your teeth,
skin and bones,
foreskin, thin-skinned
getting the Skinny, skinflints,
under your skin,
just a flesh wound.

Busy old skin:
cracking with frost and browning with rays,
sweating in the summer blaze,
blistering where rubbed too much,
opening under knives and other blades,
black-and-bluing, flaking off, clumping up,
swelling and shivering,
and, always, the itch.

A Proposition Concerning the Flesh:
Shall one who lives in the mind
be called “brainy”
and one who lives lushly in the skin
not be called in like manner “skinny”?
Shall “skinny” not be praise
for those whose skins grow
like six-inch roses, redwoods,
prize cabbages, giant butterflies?

Skin vs. the Meat of the Matter:
The skin informs the brain
strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Consider for a moment that
the brain might die
and the skin still live,
but if the skin dies
the brain’s good only
for the laboratory vat.

The Revision:
Angels are, in truth, without skin
and thereby unmarred by sin.
We shall seek the grace
of the Overskin, and the sky
will be her abode and her face.
The sacraments of the Great Flesh:
washing with water and salt,
pouring oil on troubling waters.
And after death
our loved ones will be given
our emptied skins, folded
in a delicate Fibonacci sequence
known only to the Skin Folders
whose hands will never be allowed
to touch the skins of the living,
lest they revolt against
the touch of the dead.
Their disciplines require them
never to touch themselves--
bathed by other hands,
sleeping with wrists and ankles bound,
and gloved except to flay and fold
what was used to hold,
and may contain again,
some flimsy and dispersive soul.