Is there a canvas crueler than the body?
The ink is permanent. The skin is not.
I have no patience for the lover’s gaudy
heart—swollen, pierced—a hackneyed blot
beating against the odds. I’ve seen them all:
straddled by seraphim, or torn apart—
on women, men, the lesser parlor’s wall—
hallmarked MOM, or skewered by a dart
from Cupid’s quiver.
++++++++++++++But enough of love,
I work in monochrome. I deal in skulls.
Behind each piece a brief, familiar story.
It ends in bones—the sort of plot that dulls
the point. My needle’s steadiest above
a stinging script that reads:
+++++++++++++++++++++Memento Mori.

Original appearance in the Yale Review.

Michael Shewmaker is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Yale Review, Southwest Review, Sewanee Theological Review, New Criterion, Measure, American Arts Quarterly, and other literary journals and anthologies. His work has been recently awarded a Gates Scholarship from Texas Tech University and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Currently, he lives in Menlo Park, CA, with his wife, Emily.