Natalie Eilbert
Epithalamium
It’s true that we were meant
to live in the woods but the day
is not over yet I’m carrying
this wet death in my mouth to you.
It has been centuries since
you’ve shown me your teeth,
the bald human moment
that cursed your days.
The slick fuck of a couch
in the listening room, of course
the dark entered us. We left
that night, the lake sent for us,
what lake would have us now.
A millennium dawdled out
your perfect dirt scalp, I grew
from the leaves I fell to nothing,
I waited for my very own city
of rust to form edges so
I could form edges. Each hour
you cool in my pocket
is an hour is an hour gone.
See how a journey frames
my lashes, see how I lack
a creation myth, an aluminum
sun in the back of my throat.
You pitch the minute to me:
what I own is the damage
of your theorized life. A door
flattening the understory.
I will only speak to you
with closed eyes. The woods
rattle with obsolete rapture.
I live in a nearby shape.
Epithalamium
You are too late to the scene:
how sad that we come from branches,
your dress snagged by branches.
I am already waking up
in a quarry, the everywhere nests
of your busy work, the April wind
a continuum of our falling bed.
Too often the poem tells us to find a lake.
I left a bridegroom bleeding
in a warehouse to live in this gone day,
I don’t know a thing about crawling
on my knees, just the liquor of ritual,
just the way your face means bruised stone
in the warmest light. The screaming match
of a city and a city gives your eyes color.
Your hips roan-thick with mysterious age.
Too often we greet change with soft dignity
the way a forest does the arrival of men.
In this sky a plastic fog lacks the right poison
and I will certainly never die. If we dance,
I wanted to dance. Cocktails warm to gel
all around us, my throat fills with sequins
in the middle of this terrible field.
Natalie Eilbert's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, Guernica, West Branch, Spinning Jenny, Colorado Review, The Journal, Bat City Review, Sixth Finch, The Paris-American, DIAGRAM, and many others. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review (www.theatlasreview.com)
Return to September 2013 Edition
It’s true that we were meant
to live in the woods but the day
is not over yet I’m carrying
this wet death in my mouth to you.
It has been centuries since
you’ve shown me your teeth,
the bald human moment
that cursed your days.
The slick fuck of a couch
in the listening room, of course
the dark entered us. We left
that night, the lake sent for us,
what lake would have us now.
A millennium dawdled out
your perfect dirt scalp, I grew
from the leaves I fell to nothing,
I waited for my very own city
of rust to form edges so
I could form edges. Each hour
you cool in my pocket
is an hour is an hour gone.
See how a journey frames
my lashes, see how I lack
a creation myth, an aluminum
sun in the back of my throat.
You pitch the minute to me:
what I own is the damage
of your theorized life. A door
flattening the understory.
I will only speak to you
with closed eyes. The woods
rattle with obsolete rapture.
I live in a nearby shape.
Epithalamium
You are too late to the scene:
how sad that we come from branches,
your dress snagged by branches.
I am already waking up
in a quarry, the everywhere nests
of your busy work, the April wind
a continuum of our falling bed.
Too often the poem tells us to find a lake.
I left a bridegroom bleeding
in a warehouse to live in this gone day,
I don’t know a thing about crawling
on my knees, just the liquor of ritual,
just the way your face means bruised stone
in the warmest light. The screaming match
of a city and a city gives your eyes color.
Your hips roan-thick with mysterious age.
Too often we greet change with soft dignity
the way a forest does the arrival of men.
In this sky a plastic fog lacks the right poison
and I will certainly never die. If we dance,
I wanted to dance. Cocktails warm to gel
all around us, my throat fills with sequins
in the middle of this terrible field.
Natalie Eilbert's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tin House, Guernica, West Branch, Spinning Jenny, Colorado Review, The Journal, Bat City Review, Sixth Finch, The Paris-American, DIAGRAM, and many others. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review (www.theatlasreview.com)
Return to September 2013 Edition