Jason Monios: One Poem

Jason Monios

Jason Monios left his native Australia in 2001 after completing a PhD on the structural concept of the vortex in the poetry of Ezra Pound. He then travelled and worked throughout the UK, settling in Edinburgh in 2004. His poetry has appeared in Acumen, nthposition, Poetry Scotland, New Writing Scotland, Umbrella and The Guardian.

KNITTING SKIN

Do you think you’d know if you heard
the sound of skin knitting?

Faint scratches in the dark, like mice
scrabbling beneath the floorboards.

Hesitant attempts to regain its form,
its stretch, its sense and softness.

Searching across a pulpy gap,
epidermic fingers

reach for each other, wanting to shake
hands and smother the swampy

rawness opened between them, its
stratified epithelium.

New cells bubble out of each other,
multiplying breathlessly,

giddy with the frisson of danger, the risk
they take each time they forge

a new layer. They know that one
move from you, one careless

stretch, one hurried turn and you
will break their necks, undo

all their work, force their newborn
brothers to begin again.