Cryptophasia

A minute after I sang my way to
Earth with a stomachache    you greeted our
fate     with a yawn.      Mom and Dad

sanctioned our sequential breath;    skin-to-skin
immersion in      our destined satellite-
sunned frontiers—    My sin and your shock—

Parallel banes:   amygdala-born plagues—
your Earth explodes an eclipsed palimpsest;
psychosis-pumice renders your pain

a hieroglyphic palindrome     neighbor
to my pelagic proof propulsion—    My
Earth implodes into a schematic pagan-

promised nadir:        perennial prison—
I am our sin-eater          pursued by shame-
sustenance of our progenitors—    A crime

I bear;    you break as you watch.   Our witness-
prognosis:     your brain balks at our Sea-curse
as mine breathes it into breath     Babel’s hubris—    balm

and damnation of instinct     my second sight—
What God did we bruise?         Who sanctioned our bound
burden?   You know when I bleed—    I know when you break—

Equidistance

Sallow swingset shrine
synchronicity
at the next-
door speakeasy. Blueprint
betrayal brain. Fixed
bruise barrier,
a barometric
ballistic mutant.
Patterned crux—

My no is worth as
much as a mangled
calf. I saw
twins born at dawn one
late Shenandoah
winter. Both
nonviable. The
older bore a third
eye on its

left flank, cloudy, fixed
on the ground and its
farmer. The
younger bore no eyes.
When its breath met the
Earth a swarm
of glowworms laid their
eggs in its sockets,
consumed its

skull. The farmer gave
both a week to breathe
in the snow—
The older saw hell flash
in an instant and
closed his eye
with grief. The younger held
growing glowworms in
place of its

plagued posterity,
content to sense the
week decay
into parallel ends.
I knew the tenor
of the calves’
disappearance as
I know the terror
of my vast

retreat to the slush,
frigid familiar
terminus—

Arbitration

Limestone lineage      corridor    welcomed
      me to Tennessee—      true crime radio
   blasted      Rorschach assumptions   to meows
    Missouri          changing childhood arbiter—
Promise      permuting     precedent pallor—
         relief—      Russian nesting years—     rescinded
   revolving door   documented      despair—

I know       what was done—   crucified      child—  I
    must have     always known—  back in Missouri
      I find       facsimile ferocity
rhythm     descending    upon      memory
          unguarded    in glades—    gravity grounding—
  I see the child—     I forgive her—    what was
surfacing     receding       my pendulum—

Footfall       in coneflower fields        resolve
      damnation patterns     found fragmentation
terrain—    I am constantly moving        where
         she was still     solitary sunrises
  greet     my choice—    honor my reconnaissance—
What was done     what I have now   parallel—
    Missouri     greets my nexus nod   with its

grace—   once a grave—  broken template sequence—

❊

Dilemma: A Cento

I.

So many small deaths have happened
scribbles on the margins of       evangelical
                                                        glaciers
who are ice ghosts

Here, the wind can take you
in pieces—

The air is a mill of hooks—

    it has such
implications—;
The morning of my birth, the mill beside the hospital burned.
Then it wasn’t possible
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.

Are there souls that need
death’s presence, symptom
of everything?

 
II.

Rain when I woke
sounded like horses.
I met a dying man and I said me too.

The dead make a kite
the size of god—
I did not want my body

ravenous, still insatiable
                        for years I hoped
to bypass history, live

to neutralize the air. Didn’t think there’d ever be
a way to live inside of the world:
a myth in which god sets us

on fire        guaranteed
to thumb shut      eyes at the end
       dissolve of sorrow

LIKE US, IN OUR IMAGE AND LIKENESS
          a taxidermist’s art,
                  carve and scrape

down. Assemble grief
that wed      skin
to brick and wind and dirt.


III.

I could do it. I could walk into the sea
with fire, hand-held torch, burning back

the onslaught.
                other lives I’ve lost
sight of:  closer to    dust at the back of the throat

                                      buried
in an ache in which nothing makes sense.
One numbness is not as good as another    the white

fox of death      
conceals the ideal

not to have a body—;

---

Sources: Mary Helen Callier, Virginia Konchan, Joy Harjo, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Sylvia Plath, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Diane Seuss, Cynthia Cruz




Eva Alter is an information scientist, procedural formalist poet, and Jewish-Tidewater-Appalachian American. Her poetry has been published in Hobart, American Poetry Journal, Bruiser Magazine, Appalachian Journal, Reform Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES (Eulogy Press, 2025) and Sea-oath (Hesse Press, 2026).

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