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# Ellen Skilton, Poet

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://ellenskilton.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Pages

- [Home Page](https://ellenskilton.com/)
- [Collection](https://ellenskilton.com/collection/)
- [Contact](https://ellenskilton.com/contact/)
- [About](https://ellenskilton.com/about/)

## Poems

- [Freefloating Fury](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/freefloating-fury/) - This afternoon as I walked the dog down my city streetI felt a flash of anger for the trash-invading raccoonsand later at the parking job of a strangerwho’d smashed fall’s final flowers I’d planted near the curb In the darkness of the middle of the nightI cursed the car alarm bleating under my windowwho awakened
- [Mind Metropolis ](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/mind-metropolis/) - While birds build nests, we write alphabets of their trees.In skyscrapers, the steel beams, like massive twigs,envelop and protect us in a vocabulary of shelter, place.The hills and valleys of the metropolis create shadow,refract the warm light like gleaming mountain lakes. Dichotomous childhood tales of urban and rural rodentshighlight only distinctions, but I have seen
- [To Get Here](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/to-get-here/) - It’s vertigo, plain and simple –the sky spinning under my toes,the same feet that touchsummer grass and pavement heat. Where are you from?, they say.We are from a house of longing, a gardenfull of flowering weeds, where Persiangreen, black and goldenrod meet. Grief congeals in the lungs,while the past coats the hips,but it’s the shin
- [Dwelling in Delight](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/dwelling-in-delight/) - The majestic maple’schanging coloursshout look at mein a way that makes itimpossible not to grineven as some dociledespair gathers,like old socks,around the ankles. Where the house meetsthe dirt, some wrigglingred worms line upin the dappled yellowof a new day.This abode holdswhat matters mostand ignores the barkingcoming from the side yard. Wayward joy containsthe realness of
- [Yesterday's Thunderclap Looked at Me with Awe](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/yesterdays-thunderclap-looked-at-me-with-awe/) - My toddling daughter spoke in sentences before words – the intonations and incantations carrying her meaning. I search for words, palabras, in the air – But they fly by like paper airplanes and at best, nosedive into my mouth. My morpheme relationship was always doomed. How could sounds, letters paint damp dewdrops, tastes of coriander
- [When Prose Meets Poetry](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/when-prose-meets-poetry/) - The prose poem is an escalator that starts and ends in infinity. It doesn’t like matching socks or sheet sets, but loves the way that wildflowers organize committees to get things done. The petals of a prose poem sway like wild cosmos along the roadside, piercing the solitary melancholy of quarantine with a brief flash
- [When Change First Whispered In My Ear](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/when-change-first-whispered-in-my-ear/) - The older I get, the more I’m conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn’t it? — Sandra Cisneros she said make it big, smash the system. She was as impatient as a puppy waiting to get outside
- [Gravity](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/gravity/) - Gravity is a force. Rocks fall off the mountain without effort, without intention. I nearly failed geology class in college because I had fallen so hard into love with a handsome asshole on a motorcycle. We rode by stone quarries where layers of rock laughed at our short liaison and bore witness to the past,
- [Steadfast](https://ellenskilton.com/poem/steadfast/) - Instead, it began with a different tree, someone else's, grafted onto ours. And not with spreadsheet cells, rising and falling temperatures of ovulating emptiness. When we wept, the torrents smeared every last one of the Kodachrome intercessions we had. Our calendar of family-building desires, a cathedral full of votives snuffed out by the wind. Don't