CAROLINA EBEID
All Those Gorgeous Feelings
Do they haunt you? Do they hunt you out?
often they move small
and quick like a pair of humming
birds at a feeder, a tiny
and iridescent humming about
the ears, just listen, they drink-&-drink
Do they ride your back, just like they deviled your grandma’s back?
they stick me with needles in my thigh
but that’s so to keep me well, they say
Do you feel well or like hell today?
I feel like a well today
you can lower your pail into me
tin bucket splash
rappel your name down the shaft
and I’ll chant it back
Is it matrilineal all those blues coming down the bloodline?
my grandmother said she’d throw
herself under a train, not to me, but
to my mother she said, she’d eat every white
pill in the cabinet, she never did,
she’d jump from…she’d drown in…
but she never did the things she said,
only crying wolf
All those blues, what do they do inside you?
they go out the door
in the morning all
dressed up and come
back by suppertime,
they bring in
the evening paper
You close your eyes when you sing, what’s behind those eyes when you sing?
someone put a house there, its honey lights
All those gorging feelings, how do you bed them down?
wolf, wolf
159 The Paris-American
Do they haunt you? Do they hunt you out?
often they move small
and quick like a pair of humming
birds at a feeder, a tiny
and iridescent humming about
the ears, just listen, they drink-&-drink
Do they ride your back, just like they deviled your grandma’s back?
they stick me with needles in my thigh
but that’s so to keep me well, they say
Do you feel well or like hell today?
I feel like a well today
you can lower your pail into me
tin bucket splash
rappel your name down the shaft
and I’ll chant it back
Is it matrilineal all those blues coming down the bloodline?
my grandmother said she’d throw
herself under a train, not to me, but
to my mother she said, she’d eat every white
pill in the cabinet, she never did,
she’d jump from…she’d drown in…
but she never did the things she said,
only crying wolf
All those blues, what do they do inside you?
they go out the door
in the morning all
dressed up and come
back by suppertime,
they bring in
the evening paper
You close your eyes when you sing, what’s behind those eyes when you sing?
someone put a house there, its honey lights
All those gorging feelings, how do you bed them down?
wolf, wolf
159 The Paris-American
Carolina Ebeid is a fellow at the Stadler Center for Poetry where she has been on the editorial staff of West Branch. She is also a poetry editor for the online journal Better: Culture & Lit. Her work appears in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and others. She holds an MFA from the Michener Centers for Writers, and has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the McNair Scholars Program, CantoMundo, and the Academy of American Poets. In the fall, she will begin a doctorate at the University of Denver's creative writing program.