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  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
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    • Fall | 2015 Reading
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NATALIE EILBERT

Before a Future Generation


Of necessity, I have learned to navigate
                        the junkyard of my own viscera. 

The butcher arranges my bones, desires
                        the hairs on a slabbed kneecap. 

The body is another kind of evening 
                        under infrared lights. She segments

my belly: I am so skinny no skin
                        can hurt me. I am the impression

of wind through the fur of a maimed gazelle.
                        The butcher she tends to my gashes

to make them bloodless, my neck bone a dressage
                        she will hold and make proper again.

To be sexless finally, to be meat, 
                        she places a lemon between my lips,

freshens them into a pucker to kiss
                        like the beak of a parrot fish. A man

from the village peers into the shop 
                        eager to touch me between parchment,

a man who laid me down in faux down
                        to deliver me my kingdom of filth

and hunger. My butcher she flattens my belly,
                        to be sliced is to be seen importantly,

bright tower in a failed city. She did this sipping
                        iced coffee through a straw, a Baltic song

stopped in her head. My thigh’s modern coldness
                        on the counter. You will come to know this was love.



50   The Paris-American

Picture
Natalie Eilbert's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Colorado Review, Spinning Jenny, Bat City Review, La Petite Zine, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Barn Owl Review, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist in YesYes Book's Inaugural Chapbook Competition for her manuscript, Swan Feast. She is a founding editor of The Atlas Review (www.theatlasreview.com).

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