Potential Titles: Skin

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The skin stretched over lifedebts - Rasha Abdulhadi "Mouthful of lightning"

Your theory electric on my skin - Rasha Abdulhadi "The thorn"

And I'll wear it like bones, like skin - Kim Addonizio "What Do Women Want?"

To scalpel the skin into vain grace - Samuel A. Adeyemi "Limbs"

Vivid tattoos only bright through my skin - Casey Aimer "Body Revolt"

Exposes hieroglyphs etched on her skin - Mike Allen "Carrington's Ferry"

Shedding confinements of skin and shadow - Mike Allen "Kandinsky's Garden"

He shed the Harlequin's chequered skin - Mike Allen "Picasso's Rapture"

Made habit of pulling off my skin - Gia Anansi-Shakur "The Owl"

The chrome skin of a girl behind glass - Mary Jo Bang "If Wishes Were Horses"

Skinned the surface of cinders - Mary Jo Bang "Origin of the Impulse to Speak"

Hive magic plays along my skin - Devan Barlow "A Moon Witch at the Party"

Against the granite of her skin - Charles Baudelaire "An Allegory" transl. not credited

Blurry pearls along the water's skin - Erin Belieu "She Returns to the Water"

Pearls along the water's skin - Erin Belieu "She Returns to the Water"

Wet star-dust clung to the skin - Stephen Vincent Benet "Flood-Tide"

Working in sweat and skin and bone - Carina Bissett "Seven Swans"

Crawl restless under the skin - Lindsey Boldt "A Bartable Enya Afternoon"

Whose undertow ripped his skin - Malika Booker "Jesus in the Wilderness 3: Sufferation"

Ripped his skin right to the soul - Malika Booker "Jesus in the Wilderness 3: Sufferation"

Burrowed a fever under my skin - Julia Bouwsma "Dear ghosts, when I said all I ever wanted was land"

Would never be clean enough to put against skin - Andrea Carter Brown "On Reading Allen Ginsberg's 'Homework'"

In this skin I've reclaimed - Mahogany L. Browne "Country of Water"

A shallow breathe of scaly skin - Mahogany L. Browne "If Love is For the Fishes"

Who shared almost everything but my skin - Stephanie Burt "Frostina"

Scrape the papery skin from a ginger root - Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello "The Houseguest"

And tell him the history of his skin - Tina Chang "Fury"

How to light my name under their skin - Ching-In Chen "A Natural History of My White Girl"

With skin and ink, blood and smoke - Tania Chen "A Toast from Santisima Muerte"

Skin wrapping the thankful bones - Patricia Clark "Creed"

Zipped in their maps of skin - Susan Comninos "Naked Admission: a Fantasy"

How we relate the world through our skin - Oliver de la Paz "Autism Screening Questionnaire: Social Interaction Difficulties"

Where cold damp clusters under skin - Jen DeGregorio "No Isms Except Neologism"

Cyanobacteria tattoos feathering my metal skin - Wren Douglas "Fursonas Are Not Enough, I Need to Be a Moss-Coated Mech"

Skin walls and blood rivers - Peg Edera "Harbors of Miracle"

Across the vast skin of me - Heid E. Erdich "Tick Check"

To paint swirls and stars on my skin - Mina Florea "Remember"

On a robe of marten skins - Jennifer Elise Foerster "Sixteen Shadows 10"

Stills his eyes and sees with skin - Robert Frazier "A Feel for the Heavens"

The mind's own fire beneath the cool skin - John Freeman "The Body"

Read the living text of skin - Dana Gioia "After a Line of Neruda"

Splintered skin where now she buried salt - Mónica Gomery "Ghazal for a First Lover"

The day unfolding on our skin - Lora Gray "Sometimes a Thousand Twangling Instruments"

Do not touch the stars on its skin - Nicolás Guillén "The Ursa Major" transl. by Aaron Coleman

A world of wonders in each challenge to the skin - Thom Gunn "The Man with Night Sweats"

Whistle along the skin - francine j. harris "sift"

Thunder drums the skin of sky - Georgia Heard "Room of Nature"

Offers a still life of skin - Mary Hickman "Everything Is Autobiography and Everything Is a Portrait"

Tracing gray skin around the unsayable - Brenda Hillman "The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice"

In skins of molten ice - E.W. Hornung "The Ballad of Ensign Joy"

But the skin is an obstacle course - Major Jackson "Designer Kisses"

A potion to protect your lover's skin from fire - Emily Jiang "Life Lessons"

Electricity beneath the skin - Amaud Jamaul Johnson "Black Dragons"

The pattern night pens on tender skin - Judy Jordan "Prologue"

Carving its own vows on each other's skin - Kirun Kapur "Rajat Jayanti"

And claim all things feather, skin, scale - Janet Kauffman "Instead of Flying in Water"

Take the new skin this place has offered - Cam Kelley "Playing Fetch with the Grim"

Heartache on my skin like an old burn - Vandana Khanna "Destruction Myth part 2"

It hurts to unbutton his name from your skin - Cassandra Khaw "Instructions for When You've Endured as Much as You Can"

I want to cloak my skin in a stolen night - Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa "The Wicked Lady"

How a man's skin becomes the final page - Yusef Komunyakaa "The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems"

I am dreams painted onto the skin - Yusef Komunyakaa "Frida's Earth Mother"

The thin fabric of our skin - Michael Lauchlan "Snow"

Now alive under my skin - Dorianne Laux "Blossom"

Hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance - D.H. Lawrence "How Beastly the Bourgeois Is"

Little chips of dream flake off my skin - Joseph Lease "America [Try saying wren]"

Two discrete young snakes left their skin - Robin Coste Lewis "Summer"

All this skin that will never bear fruit - Angela Liu "The witches are without work"

Breaks skin, soars past bone - Kyle Carrero Lopez "Modern Fiction"

Shedding the skin that everyone fears - Tariq Luthun "Ode to Brown Child on an Airplane for the First Time"

Flints of sunlight strike against your skin - Naomi Long Madgett "Signature"

Lizard skin for moisture harvests - Nisa Malli "Autologous Transplant"

Our skin is rust and metal - Sally Wen Mao "Anna May Wong Stars as Cyborg #86"

The poem slides under your skin - Kettly Mars "Between midnight and eternity" transl. by Nathan H. Dize

To be blinded in the skin by a god of light - Harry Martinson "Aniara 58" transl. by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg

The donkey stole the lion's skin and brayed - J. Fairfax McLaughlin writing as Pasquino "The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons"

In my own skin in this infinity mirror - Lynn Melnick "Poem Entering the Apple Valley Target"

His skin shimmering with each vibration - Anastasios Mihalopoulos "Orpheus as the Last Living Blue Whale"

The skin touching nothing - Tyler Mills "Zinnias"

Legacies of skin, smoke, & salvation - Kamilah Aisha Moon "Stacy"

And our skin with shadows - Daniel Nadler [untitled]

From the skin of a celestial beast - Pablo Neruda "Cordilleras" transl. by Maria Jacketti

The poisonous skin of the copper - Pablo Neruda "Evening LXIII" transl. by Stephen Tapscott

And skin the feathers from that wound - Caroline Harper New "Notes on Devotion"

Years flying out of your skin - Naomi Shihab Nye "Late"

A magical geography of skin - Naomi Shihab Nye "My Body Is a Mystery"

blue will-o-wisps cross my skin - Catherine O'Ciarmacain "Steelwife"

An empty skin for the mice to nibble - Mary Oliver "Black Snake This Time"

Delicate uplifts of dust-colored skin - Mary Oliver "Look Again"

i cultivated a land of flowers on my skin - Ismail Yusuf Olumoh "Hypercapnia" [Strange Horizons 20 Jan. 2025]

Burned in my skin like a stone - Kiki Petrosino "Pastoral"

Brittle cicada skins abandoned - Xan Phillips "I Never Felt Comfortable in My Own Skin so I Made a New One"

Cast against an ocean's skin - Xan Phillips "Never Have I Ever"

Gills hidden under keloid skin - Rain Prud'homme-Cranford "Gills"

Rinse dreams from your skin - Khadijah Queen "Declination"

Unzip my skin and leave it elsewhere - Sina Queyras "Years"

Glass marbles under my skin - Danni Quintos "Breast Pain"

Pretend to recognize the spirit under the skin - Jacie Ragan "The Secret Lives of Fingerprints"

Whose skin resembles the bark of an ancient oak - Kris Ringman "Oak Skin"

Interrupted by the living points of constellated skin - Margaret Ross "Socks"

my skin is a mirror of past lives - Alexandra Seidel "Cerberus, Seeking Lethe"

the wolf in a skin of bare steel - Alexandra Seidel "Cerberus, Seeking Lethe"

To curdle dawns uneaten skin - Betsy Sharp "Alarm"

Into a thousand skins - Patricia Smith "Siblings"

With no new skin to shelter - Lyz Soto "Today I Am Full of Birds"

Wind skinning itself in the trees - A.E. Stallings "The Dogdom of the Dead"

For no sleek eel inside an oily skin - James Stephens "The Gang"

Sun burns new meaning onto my skin - Fargo Tbaki "Palestine Is a Futurism: The Dream"

The skinning gales unpin the winter's robes - Dylan Thomas "Light breaks where no sun shines"

One-sided skins of truth - Dylan Thomas "Our eunuch dreams"

The wind threads its needles through skin - Russell Thorburn "Tracking the Wolf"

The viper that squeezes out of the skin of its remembrance - Samantha Thornhill "38. Shedding the Old"

each grain of rice leaving a scar on our skin - Évelyne Trouillot "A Rain of Stars" [excerpts] transl. by Danielle Legros Georges

Friction against the Dragon's skin - Emilio Villa "Poetry is" transl. by Dominic Siracusa

Mistake these walls for skin - Ocean Vuong "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong"

Scorches the skin of night - Derek Walcott "Arkansas Testament VII"

Under our transient skins - Valerie Wallace "House of McQueen"

To shake a finer silence from its skin - Noah Warren "Cattail History"

Thought sheds its language skin - Noah Warren "Shuttle"

Leopard skin about her shoulders flung - Helen Hay Whitney "The Joy of Life"

As it slips from a curl of birch skin - Amie Whittemore "The Alien Epistles, Letters 1-3"

Take a left into the wrong skin - Kevin Young "Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown]"

The curling paper serpent sheds his printed skin - Cynthia Zarin "Orbit"

Sunset's skinned knuckle try at holding fast - Cynthia Zarin "Orbit"


The green-skinned, black-skinned garden of Osiris - Bruce Smith "Garden"


Wrapped in buckskin and silver - Joy Harjo "Kansas City"


Ink of the green-skinned holly - "Colum Cille the Scribe" transl. by Kuno Meyer

The green-skinned, black-skinned garden of Osiris - Bruce Smith "Garden"


Achilles of the moleskins and the gridiron - Frank Horne "Letters Found Near a Suicide" [Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, ed. by Countee Cullen, 1927]


Wearing nothing but snakeskin boots - Ansel Elkins "Autobiography of Eve"


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