Finalist for the Driftless Prize in Poetry Learn more >
Natalie Eilbert: One Morning I Assembled the Body to Perfection
In the morning I’ve a vague invention, throttled
sticks for a bundle and I’m sick, sick of the kitchen’s
soft pornographies, the man I’ve shaped together
from leaves and spit, the man I’ll nest in from leaves and spit.
Certain words suggest a landscape and I’m afraid
of its grasses, what it would mean to plant my bare feet there,
like drowning in impartial greens or worse, not drowning.
I want my man to speak, I want a kettle to rise from his lips,
to sit in the aqua umbrella of his eloquence. It is easy
to be straw, it is easy to travel through time this way.
72 elks wait along a threshold begging magic and gentle music.
What I want is the want to leave me like a sewer coin,
to wrap my man in sheets and plunge him over the railing
botched as he should be botched, indifferent to falling.
Soon I’ll have aborted all the ruminants, let their sorrel singe
the plains bloodlessly, droplets of paint disappearing
in that verbose nature. I’m mouthing false names for colors now,
I’ve the mechanisms to build your organs, the heartbreak
of seagulls circling your warm offals, a peace offering.
What man doesn’t taste the fingers of his maker, the labor’s studious oils.
My man coos dust and lint in his efforts to live, we’re to go
to a bar later for heavy drinking—it’s why I made him, why
I made him to suck my greased joints. All the whiskey in the world
will pool beneath his hollow feet, I his rebel dog’s frenzied lapping.
NATALIE EILBERT’s work has been published in or is forthcoming from Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, Spinning Jenny, Bat City Review, Colorado Review, Barn Owl Review, Sixth Finch, The Paris-American, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a founding editor of The Atlas Review (www.theatlasreview.com).
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