Author: Natalie Eilbert

My idea for a poem was brilliant because it left me

before I could get my hands on it. The shower rinsed

it away. A delicate network of sugars turned gelatinous,

a killswitch offensive. The poem already knew me from

before I was born. It showed itself to me the way two birds

showed me their plumage yesterday by crashing into a window.

Instant death, and with it, taxonomy! Azure blue wings.

Stripped of miracles, the idea can live unbound. It was

an Eastern Bluebird, I think, a male and female who saw

nothing but sky ahead and then nothing at all. All day 

I knew I had killed them. My settlement by a marshland

bashes small necks and makes mud of the spark of life.

I sing “The Owl and the Pussycat” in my mettlement,

my clever harshland with its runciple grasses. I move 

the birds to a stone out of sight, my mind shivering crystals.

---

Hi friends! I had a hard few days at work and in life and am now 4 days behind. Trying not to let that bum me out. But I’m back!

how the fuck are we supposed to feel calm, it is April 7

and the president proposed annihilating an entire people

and then capitulated to a two-week ceasefire by nightfall,

we celebrated V.’s birthday, I drank two glasses of wine in quick

succession, my sibling said in case this is the end, I love you,

the children said they would form a human chain around bridges,

people said they were willing to die, I ordered vegetarian ramen

and we talked shop, I got in my car and drove home, civilization is ending

and there isn’t a thought in my head, I finish and send a blurb, the seltzer

ticks in the can, I love the view of Milwaukee coming over the Hoan

and maybe the light of the buildings from a bridge can be a thought, 

a moment where consciousness buckles to hold a vision of such might,

the cats were waiting for me at home, my sibling texts crisis averted,

the crowd at the Taylor watch party erupted in cheers, I floss my teeth

Forgot to thoroughly wash the leeks, crunches of dirt
with every bite. Learn about a shop caught serving seagull

that had to shutter. Birds grind stones and earth through
the gizzard. The one time I tried gizzard on a torched stick

I gagged from its hardness. People enjoy the grit of sand
when they know the organ’s function. But I was 24 and broken.

Had known tongues to be alien in my mouth, my mouth also
strained and alien. At night, I pull protein threads from my teeth.

Know that I beg for love when it’s denied. That I will chew the
earth and its nutrients with hungry rhythm if it means I’ll be held.

Seagull chicks know to peck on the red dot of their mother’s
lower beak to stimulate vomit. This is succor, how to survive.

I presented you a bowl, a hamper of clean, folded linens, an un opened
La Croix. Somewhere, heaps of beaks flash red, hunger every direction.

In novels, teenagers long on beaches, wear black glasses
to hide their crying eyes, and fall in love with friends who
have already betrayed them. The sand is a consciousness
on their skin, the wind doesn’t factor in. I love the summering

drama and the smart of paradise, trading secrets in the gossamer
constitution of girlhood. I come home late in the night to anger
and accusations. A soft rain that paints cold my hair. Nobody
knows about Long Island beaches here, the disgusting men after whom

our shores are named. I sit a room away from an argument, turn
over the poetry anthology from Gaza and the West Bank. On their ruins,
Palestinians stand with their phones in the air hoping to catch a signal
so they may sign off on an English translation. I count the pay periods

until I can again afford donating to mutual aids. For no reason, Plath
enters my mind. It can talk talk talk, will you marry it marry it marry it.
The poem can’t be anything but indulgent, isn’t that always the rub.
Sometimes a child walks into the sea. Wave foam soaks like human spit.

The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive,
a medium told me once. She offered no reason for this. 
But what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?

At my brother’s wedding, we stood for the first time
in a social circle. We both remembered his fist.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive.

His eyes, dark with aversion. The way in the room 
in the basement he trapped me. Was I nine? Was I six?
So what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?

In so many ways, that room is where I was born.
He delivered me, naked and wrenched and sick.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive.

Last night, a ghost tugged at my feet and I saw her
flash past me, my nocturne, my prismed abyss.
And what of the gaze of the man who harmed me?

I waited for her return, my cats curled along my body
as in two lungs. I was alone. I’d always been alone.
The most important thing we can do in this life is forgive,
So what should I make of the gaze of the man who harmed me?

Earth. A shot taken from space. Earth that made and fed man. 
Man that shoved Earth down the stairs. Took her picture. Man.

I miss when we talked about the coal burning in Virginia required
when we watch Netflix. Now we call it self-care. And it is. It rains.

All the time it rains. My children, who don’t exist, sleep in the silt
residue of my teapot. This life wrecked me. Describes the color red.

The flash of red on the TV, the trademarked thud of its name. I can’t
buy the idea of God, but a cold hand on my cheek is a whole religion.

Red couch, a mellowing. In every timeline, a red couch with a wound
of orange foam. Me, twirling my left bang in thoughtless ceremony.

We first went to the Moon the same year the military funded the research
that would form the internet. A network of networks of networks.

Earth. A bowl filled with horseshoe crab blood. Copper blue. Wisps
of her agony. Earth and her comment section of awe and conspiracy.

I have never been so anguished that I’ve threatened someone with death

and I live among Man, who does. My anguish is I don’t know what to do

with this information beyond live. The robins are out. The violets. In my

old life, when the violets ached out the cold dirt, I became overcome with

a genius that stings my eyes. Now, my cat smells a piece of lint on the carpet

and I sit in my upholstery of options. I’ve loved the wrong way for so long

I forgot about the violets, these forever preverbals. I let myself out of spaces.

The lobby door clicks shut and I’ve never been more sorry. I dismiss the red

watch of weather. I pass the dead owl in the grass by the parking lot, a rod

impaled through its head. I say what I always say: I’m sorry this happened 

to you. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry this happened to you.

The law stipulates that every constitution spreads.

Like blood exposed to water as when at the beach.

When a plane hummed overhead, your arm in the sea.

Cut from an unknown source. The artificial intelligence.

Of cells gathering into mind, dispersed as in wind. Or.

I tell the story of the broken deer degloved at the knee.

Stamping the ground like cables boring into soil. And.

How I followed this cursed Virgil until she blended with.

The understory, which is I suppose its own pool of harm.

So much spreading. When we cease. When we pool.

How strange it is to be an organization. I wear my father’s.

Fitbit because he couldn’t bear the watchfulness. It.

Reminds me to move, to defy earth law, if only for a.

Moment. I write a nine-word novel so I can memorize time.

An iPhone bell rings in the plane humming miles overhead. 

Unbearable distance. I have decided to let the past haunt me.