Poem of the Week: Emily Skillings

CANARY

I held my canary out for you when you said your canary felt a little droopy.

Your canary was a ruby drop in my frosty glass of canary.

The canary between us grew for many days.

I wanted to fight the canary, but you held me back.

The officer shot the unarmed canary on a canary I used to walk down every day.

When you touched the canary underneath my knee, a balloon filled with canary in an eastern corner.

The sound of unmarked canaries overhead frightened the rural hospital.

The president has never commented publicly on the controversial canary program.

Can you remember where that canary was that we tried so many years ago?

Oh, that canary feels so good—just like that.

The canaries carry electricity to our houses in even smaller canaries.

When the activists passed out yellow canaries I took one and read it.

A canary is born every 8 seconds.

I log onto the large canary to check how my canary is faring.

When I go to the supermarket, I check the codes on the canaries to make sure they are not genetically modified canaries.

Many canaries suffer.

She pressed a thumb into my muscle and all the canary was released into me.

When I went outside I saw the sky. It was filled with canary.

You held the canary up to my face. You vibrated the canary at a new frequency.

You said the best time for canaries was 11:30 am.

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Emily Skillings is a dancer poet poet dancer.  Recent poetry can be found in No Dear, Bone Bouquet, Lingerpost, Stonecutter, La Fovea and Maggy. Skillings dances with Saifan Shmerer, the A.O. Movement Collective and The Commons Choir (Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik). She lives in Brooklyn, where she is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and event series. She is a co-curator of the Brooklyn reading series HOT TEXTS with Krystal Languell. On July 25, 2013, she and her collaborator Lillie De will perform their dance theater piece (being fluid and knowing what to fill) at Dixon Place.