The Little Universe / Meghan Bliss

  dancing girl press, 2015$7.00      Meghan Bliss is a writer and editor whose creative work has been published in Rust+Moth, Southern Women's Review, A Poetry Congeries, What the Fiction, Charlotte Writers Anthology, and Mary Jane's Farm, among others. She lives in Coastal North Carolina with her husband, Patrick, and writes at TheBlissfulPoet.com.      Skip and Sink   I once knew a man who must’ve looked for missing parts of himself in women across the whole country. He was a frayed saddle, a weathered skin of butter-soft leather and bold-buckled bones.   He had horse-hoof hair and eyes like river stones I once skipped across the current while my father shoved hooks through soft, pliable bodies of worms, and all I wanted to do was follow follow       follow and dip into that placid blue, to inhale the heavy silk, the fishwater, the bleak milky everything.   Instead I’d only imagine that sprightly skip and sink when my father, in his heavy-breathed whorl of whiskey and pine, wou