Skyler Jaye Rutkowski

A Mountain of Past-Lives and the Things I’ve Learned


I'm always learning mountains from other people.
Things like:
How climbing into courage takes
the use of knives, sometimes.
How someone can dig up the cracked skulls of
past lives with their bare hands.
How the let go can be the hardest part for one person,
and somehow the easiest part for the other.

Some mountains I've learned should have come with "falling rock" signs,
A way to warn bystanders of what's to come.
I would beg forgiveness if I thought I needed to,
Bash my knees into learned solitude of a varied terrain.
But we'll blame it on the people who taught me hate:

I.
A woman. Watched wicked hands drape a black ribbon around inexperienced wrists.
Her eyes burn into naive ribcages while they were broken by bartering men.
The darkness ate her. She let it devour her daughter.
There were seven years of bad luck for every bottle she broke with her teeth
Passed on the omen to her children.
Left them stranded in her cursed slurs while their childhood rotted beneath her addict touch.
Found homes in men paying rent with a daughter’s body.She never apologized.

II.
A cavalier smile of a man with black ribbons for hands
Sawed the bones of a girl with dreams bigger than a home she was buried in.
Her lips bled for every year she saw
his predatory eyes in other people.
He never flinched at the bile in her throat, and she never stopped bleeding.
A home draped in lust. Built the bridge from innocence to damaged with the friction between his thighs, led straight to a door he walked out of.
The disappearance act of a man with decomposing skin left space
between answers I was too young to ask.
I'll live cautious until an obituary is written.

III.
An artist with a blemished tongue.
Busted stenciled-out fist marks found on the pale skin
of his lover.
Swallowed the world out of her.
Took the body of a broken thing.
Broke it harder.
Warning signs flashed above blue rimmed glasses and beneath broken fingernails.
He was a heartbeat dripping sins.
I still feel healed bruises when I think of him.
A mixed medium of objections and unapologetic wounds.
Some days the climb gives me the vertigo of falling into too much.
The mountain grew on shattered livelihood
And I've been stumbling my way through since
before I knew what lessons were.
What it meant to resent.
I'm always tracing back defeated footsteps knowing exactly where they'll take me,
Always hoping they won't.


Home Sweet Home


It’s the sunray spackles on my pale back, and the red vintage
Rug on my living room floor that make me want to buy
One of those cheesy “Home Sweet Home” signs
The kind that people only ever get as gifts because
If it really felt like home, you wouldn’t need the sign to prove it.

You’d smell it in the chocolate-chip cookie air and feel it
In the green-thumb breeze flowing through your orchids above
The kitchen sink. But this is different.
I want the sign to hang as a plaque above my head to
Remind me that I have a home again.

Some mornings, I’ll wake up from the chill coming through my window,
It takes me a moment to realize that I can stay.
And that I want to.

See, I’ve always had commitment issues with places.
Always had an itch on the side of my ankle that made me
Want to skip the sidewalks of new cities.

Staying too long always made me feel stagnant.
Which in theory, isn’t a good thing to be.
I forget that trees are planted so they could grow.
That without stop signs, we’d wake to morning car crashes.

I could blame my aversion to homes by the twenty-three I had
And lost
In my first fourteen years, but it could be
From all the concrete I swallowed every time I
Tripped up on denial.
Having a home always tasted like hard places.

It’s drinking tea and talking politics around my kitchen table,
Putting on facemasks and watching romantic comedies,
Eating pizza while writing poetry;
All of these are the perpetual circumstances of being alive in a home.

When the last four places you stayed gave you rug-burn on the welcome mat.

Sometimes living in a space that you don’t fit into feels like being reprimanded for dishonesty.
Like the brick walls know all the secrets you’ve been keeping
And they want to bury you;
Drip pieces of your lies from the drywall, paint chips splatter
Onto your artwork and expose you.

I’ve heard people say that someone’s home is an extension of themselves,
But I want to know about someone without a home.

Are they so full of who they are that they don’t need one?
Or are they just not anyone at all?
I know that as a kid, I considered myself a bad-luck charm.
I thought that eviction was etched into a pattern through the freckles on my face.

If home is an extension of who you are,
That explains why I was walked past waving “need food” signs while
Warming the curbs of the west side at seven.
Or how I was the only one who was able to taste “help” from the air
in my throat at eight. I barely remember the nine elementary schools
I went to, but I remember hiding an eviction notice from my mom
In a diary for so long, that when the police came to say
Our thirty days were overdue, I told them
That it didn’t count if she didn’t read it.

I can’t remember every street we walked and
Slept on, but I’m here now.
And I’ve been thinking of finding a local shop
That engraves permanence into wood.
I’ll grab a “My First Home” sign, hang it on the solid wall
Above my bed.
I’ll reach out to the extensions of my personality.
Maybe I’ll see it in the art on my walls,
Or hidden in the empty spaces of my bookcase.
I’ll sing Home Sweet Home when I see it.


Star Party


One of my favorite things to do is ask for
Secrets. I like harboring words that are only meant for me.
Sometimes I’ll see them dance across your skin in the movements
You make, or hide themselves in furrowed eyebrows.

Giving away secrets makes you a story teller, and
I’m craving the kind of knowledge that only comes from listening
To the creaks in a person’s voice, or the octave of their laughter.

I think the secrets of a person’s character can be found in the things
They talk about, I think sometimes it can be found in the things
They won’t.

Someone once said that my secrets game seemed to be a
Void filler for gaps in genuine conversation.
But I just don’t think they understand.

I find silence in dialogue to be just as telling as the words we’re speaking
But I know what it’s like to have galaxies clogging your throat.
When you’re trying to be heard but your words are sucked into
A black hole and it feels like the big bang was really out to get you.

I’m not trying to pull dark matter from your teeth,
I ask as an invite to spill the cosmos from your lungs the way
I wish I knew how to.

Sometimes our thoughts are eclipsed by the world
Around us, I want to offer a space for
Meteor showers.

So tell me.
Tell me how you think of nightmares even in the daytime.
How your best friends addiction is a battle you’re not sure
You can win.
The way that eyelashes against your cheek make you think
Of the last person you learned to love.
I want to know which superhero you wanted to save you
When you were young.
Tell me anything you want me to know.

I don’t want to have to borrow a Barlow Lens to see that you
Cannot find a way to touch the equinox.
That you can’t plant your foot on anything because you forgot
How to be grounded.

Sometimes speaking our thoughts puts our life into retrograde,
But I just want to know you.
I want you to feel like a Nova.
A star, explosively shedding your layers without
Destroying yourself.
Leave endings to the supernovas,
Fill your chest with star dust,
We’ll have a star party to see the solstice in you.

Remember that your brightness can change
Over the course of a day, year, life;
You are a variable star.
The twilights in your mind got us here.

We can reach the zenith from here.
Stand on our toes and stretch our
Arms overhead until we capture every inch of truth
In the waning of a moon.
You’ll never be a gibbous to me.

There’s a cluster on your tongue
Waiting to spill.


Skyler Jaye Rutkowski is a poet from Buffalo. She's a recent graduate from SUNY Fredonia with a Bachelors in International Relations. She currently runs writing workshops, often in her chaotic home, and spends a large portion of her time avoiding cliches.