Emily Skaja

AAP/Walt Whitman Fellow ( 2019 ) Writing USA

I am so grateful for my time at Civitella, which gave me the space to breathe and think after a long and difficult semester of dissertation writing and book touring. I spent my time going for long walks, getting to know the other Fellows and their inspiring work, visiting rare art in tiny medieval towns so beautiful and so unlike my own home, and reading in the Secret Garden as I stared out at the hills of Umbria and worked on planning out the turns of my second book. I loved my time at the castle, and I’m so glad that I was able to be there.

Brute Strength

Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman

written out of my own story, I’ve been trying

to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash

back to my beginning, that girlhood—

kite wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds

tearing out from under the hickories

all those fine August mornings so temporary

so gold-ringed by heat haze & where is that witch girl

unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt

of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn’t let a boy hit her,

girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide