Emily Bilman
Barrier-Skin
Gearless, I dived down
The bathos of the Coral Sea
And swam among coral-atriums.
A mnemonic coral-branch now bleeds into my memory.
From the dim anteroom, they had brought in
A bowl of oil to mend my bruises but my blood
Fomented until we beseeched
The vellum-book of hours
To graft the primal zoo-colonies
With chlorophyll, imploring the hours
To eradicate the aragonite gnawing
Upon the primeval coral shells
On the bare bathos of my gearless dive.
Like poison nettle-welts, toxic palythoa
Polyps had blemished my barrier-skin
With clotted blood and urticaria.
Emily Bilman, PhD is a poet-scholar who lives and writes Geneva, CH. Her dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, with her poetry translations, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in 2013 by Peter Lang, CH. Her poetry books, A Woman By A Well (2015), Resilience (2015), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018), and Apperception (2020) were published by Troubador, UK. Poems were published in Deronda Review, The London Magazine, San Antonio Review, The Wisconsin Review, Expanded Field, Poetics Research, The Blue Nib, Tipton Poetry Journal, North of Oxford Journal, Otherwise Engaged Magazine, Literary Heist, The High Window, Wild Court, Remington Review, Book of Matches, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Poets Live Anthology 4, OxMag, San Diego Poetry Anthology, Contemporary Poetry 2022, and Poetry Salzburg Review. http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman