  The traditional bulk-boundary correspondence assuring robust gapless modes at
the edges and surfaces of insulating and nodal topological materials gets
masked in non-Hermitian (NH) systems by the skin effect, manifesting an
accumulation of a macroscopic number of states near such interfaces. Here we
show that dislocation lattice defects are immune to such skin effect or at most
display a \emph{weak} skin effect (depending on its relative orientation with
the Burgers vector), and as such they support robust topological modes in the
bulk of a NH system, specifically when the parent Hermitian phase features band
inversion at a finite momentum. However, the dislocation modes gradually lose
their support at their core when the system approaches an exceptional point,
and finally melt into the boundary of the system across the NH band gap
closing. We explicitly demonstrate these findings for a two-dimensional NH
Chern insulator, thereby establishing that dislocation lattice defects can be
instrumental to experimentally probe pristine NH topology.
