natalie eilbert
There Are No New Self-Portraits
But maybe subjugation was never about the eventual god of it all. A train is leaving, singing its sham song, its refundable fugue. Where were the people when the city quit happening, the city dark like a halfslaughtered buck, the stars a lie one lets slip from his mouth. The hungry know there is no poetry in hunger, so sit out this score. There is no confidence in entering a room, there is simply the door and a space once lusted now diminished now female. Shape is an apology capable of infuriating. No, it is a sham, like how they named a cold gray berry aronia, moved by the sound of an idea of the thing. Sham unbroken, unextinguished. The stars a lie that fails being pulled to the grave, the lie of a family history, a suffering culled and fed and loved like the prodigy child. The cities that make the city must continue else the metal shrivels like a cold gray aronia bundle. The districts they are clouded with fat, blank billboards like empty picture frames they say I have no memories. It isn’t sad. There is the beauty of discovering ruins, then there is a flood that kills without allegory, the sham of empire, sham of order, the saints and the mountebanks alike and taken. Where were the people when the letter arrived announcing the memoir dead. In the ruins of fruit there is still sugar, then the myth arrives: then the damp clean heart.
Natalie Eilbert's poetry can be found or is forthcoming from Tin House, West Branch, Guernica, Spinning Jenny, Devil's Lake, Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives writes in Greenpoint, New York, where she is a founding editor of The Atlas Review.
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