
TWO POEMS
Reboot of Aliens to Cast Myself
I am daughter of the place you long to set dry fire to. Steel slats buckling
with acid, eviscerated
wire. This place that
ribbons terror,
where lingering repeats that nothing
soft was meant to be here.
Not-dead girl whose bones marrow
slightness and neglect, my survival slow erosion,
disintegration: not erasure. Mouthing an act at night. I didn’t want to grow up as a quiver
and therefore never grew. In the film I scramble through air ducts, whisper
steam
to cook monster tails. Bite swarming as a
feast. My body wanders and nothing
that I do isn’t ghost. There’s a
scene where I’m dead-named
by silence:
it hugs my face, juts long
pauses in my mouth. In the
next scene
it’s killed, its blood used for
mascara deep enough to bend
light,
that burns my lids and can’t be smeared. In the film my hair up, wearing something diaphanous
while pressed into a sightless drone. Kiss the queen with flame, burn her eggs. I take her place.
what starts a list poem about OCD
• becomes sliced apple on
toothpick
tossed into the
ocean;
• pillbugs stuck to
billboards
and wriggled
punctuation;
• index definitions of the
verb
to be for latitudinal
study;
• because mine rhymes the
broken
push-lock in a public
bathroom;
• because predictable mentioning
locks
when writing about
obsession;
• in Obsession, a man apologizes for the wait
time at a restaurant until his wife explodes;
• until her body made from bits of
paper
drifts down to him like
snow;
• the scene a dream to
everyone
except the
man;
• perched inside my chest a
vulture
that I arrow when it
feasts;
• its crooked beak-smile
when
I penetrate its
wing;
• its head nestles in my
arm,
we stack spines of roadkill into columns;
• in Obsession, the man can’t stop
erecting
monasteries to stop his late wife’s dream-death;
• he can’t stop waking as a felled
tree being hollowed as a flute;
• saying sorry spells a lover’s
name
and indicates a
question;
• when say means whip across a small of back;
• navigating somewhere between its blood-jet
and disaster of my
mouth.
CD Eskilson is a queer nonbinary writer, educator, and editor living near Los Angeles. Their work has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Cardiff Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere. They are an associate editor for the Exposition Review. They also like reenacting David Lynch movies and drinking coffee.