Two Poems by Chelsea Eckert

THE ASEXUAL

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said
when I mentioned that after ten some-
odd years of psychotropics, I was a
sort of celibate Barbie doll. And I
told him that as a chemical eunuch
I’ve found that it’s like wearing a
blindfold — how sometimes I lie against
my best friend’s back, and meditate
on the hilly swell of her breathing,
and the knotting of her spine, and
her skin’s shudder-and-twitch. I always
know what it all means, I said.

And this guy went and bought me a drink.

---

SALMON TO THE KERMODE BEAR

You are our Ursa Major,
obscured, hanging in the
world above, the sun tipping
your ears with lambent gold —

and you are our falling star —
white as surprise —

when you cleave our skies
and stir us into madness,
and there is a shaking as
our universe froths and
foams, and you have absconded
with one of our own —
but the rest of us, we
labor our way to the promised
land —
where we redden with the
dusk, and die without you —

our stupefying god.

---

About the author :

Chelsea Eckert is a creative writing undergraduate in her senior year at San Jose State University. Her poem “Nostalgia” previously won a James Phelan Literary Award; this, however, is her first publication. If she could be anything in the world right now, she’d be a lion.