CAROLINA EBEIDAll 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 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.
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Next week's poet:
Matthew Nienow |