Against Soulmates by David Eileen
Poetry editor Sarah Ristola Bass on today’s poem: “Against Soulmates” crowds close to the reader as it’s laid bare like a corpse on display. Nothing can separate us from its biblically accurate angels, its Babel and babbling, its dreams of a common language, its dogs named for the highest and lowest points—all the heavens and hells. We are stuck between “all this shit” and “the family feeling” by a string of familiar neithers & nors—fighting towards a lineage and a resilience that is sacred and bloody and pressing against us. This poem asks us to wrestle with each other until our breathing slows, whether that be because we are hushed into calmness or into death.
Against Soulmates
After Romans 8:38-9
After all this shit I am persuaded to finality that neither decay nor flourishing, neither
repressed memory nor antipsychotic, not an angel’s Seroquel nor their wheeling eyes,
nor the nerve map flayed from the corpse for medicinal instruction nor the naked zing
the witness gets from seeing that display, nor a lack of common language nor the chatter
of desperate participants, nor the creatures I left behind nor the small dogs we look forward
to naming Zenith & Nadir, nor any other dream or the loss of dreams shall be able
to separate us from the family feeling I bit into your blood when I fixed my teeth
on your neck & twisted my shoulder up to meet your mouth so you could pin me
in your jaw too, my pulse in your underbite & slowing still.
David Eileen lives in the mountains of Virginia. Their writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Diagram, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Best of the Net, among others, with more shared at www.david-eileen.com. A big advocate for talking to your neighbors; their work & letters are concerned with interconnectedness, lineage, queer resilience, labor rights, solidarity, & care for the planet. Find them on Twitter @weirdmuseum.
