Natalie Eilbert
Chippewa Falls
Breaking news leads tend to rely on a passive voice. Someone
was found dead. A legislator was convicted. The story isn’t about
the man on a walk with his child when they come across the body
of a little girl on a walking trail. Their role, tucked into a verb that
also means be. April 25 will be a day marked by a billionaire
buying something that rots our ego minds; it will always mean
more than a murdered girl. I sever an onion and think of the man
who left us a voicemail calling us cocksucking communists
for writing about race in local politics. Ire a ring of onion skins
caught on the ear, a girl murdered, and reason, that dumber poetry
that presents a bleached bone instead of an orchid. There were
the men who shoved women in front of subway trains in the ’90s,
and I’d stand on platforms holding my body like a stanza.
All the girls and women tripped and mocked and groped,
writhing under skin, knitting organs into bricks. There was
a girl who liked the color purple. Thaw gushed the river.
A ten-year-old was found dead today.
Natalie Eilbert is the author of the poetry collections Overland (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), Indictus (Noemi Press, 2018), and Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry and winner of the George Bogin Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America. Eilbert lives in Green Bay, WI, where she is a statewide mental-health reporter.