Poems by Skye Gilkerson

Erotica for the Sea Turtle Swimming into the Glass of her Tank

by Skye Gilkerson

From Canary Spring 2023

Skye is a visual artist who was raised in the endless quiet of the Great Plains and slowly made her way to the Hudson Valley, where her house perches on a hill overlooking Rondout Creek.

She eats regularly and will never be harmed, the volunteer assures me. I watch with recognition as she paddles against the glass of her tank, drawn every few years to imagined migrations.

Born into a laboratory study, they explain, she cannot survive the wild. It’s like making zoom calls from the cubicle, we laugh.

Her eyes slowly blink as she pushes water this way and that way, alone in her cage, unfolding diamond rainbows under florescent light, every cell directing her to find him, oceans away, claw marks beneath her shell, his flippers at her neck as she carries them both to the surface for air.

Letter to the Sun

by Skye Gilkerson

From Canary Fall 2023

I’d like to know you in eight billion years, after the effluence has extinguished and you’re a smooth black globe, polished through your own force of gravity. What I’ll want to ask is whether in all that compressed carbon resides the memory of our epoch, those years of salt water and blood, rain clouds and chlorophyll and peach blossoms, giant sloths and pygmy deer and crocodiles and the internet, pine needles and spaceships and nerve endings and democracy. After our oceans have evaporated at your intensity, will you still remember that time when everything was perfect, penetrating closed eyelids with Ferris wheel ribbons of flame, and, even on a snowy day, warming my face?