Planet Nine
— Natalie Eilbert
That we are always searching for certainty and doomsday
is always two breaths away. When you showed me the news.
I paced. Worry masking a glee. Cioran says we do not rush
toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth. I have hated
my every attempt at narrative. It is a lie I impart, the easy
method of control that suggests I am guided by measured
factors. I am not guided by measured factors. As my primary
vocation, I deceive. My sense of the universe is a secret
as much as it is a threat. I lock eyes with strangers, their faces
a green flash, a series of accidents. In all my stories, an agent
removes me from the scene. I disrupt and wake up. The same
green sheets. My father is planet nine. My brother is planet nine.
My other brother is planet nine. My mother is planet nine.
I disagree with the elements that expose my lines. When I
wake, I have already left. When I die, there is a brief pause.
Death is a matter of resolving the source of light. The sun shines.
The problem of proximal blood is its distal limbs, the stunted
aftermath. When I live, I blame a body of water. My sex
is a hypothetical circle. What I want to communicate
is the breadth of my irony. I watched a trapped bird fly over
and over into a skylight as a child and I realized in its mind
there was no equation: not a bird, not wings, not flight.
It was an object in a disrupted frequency. When I blinked,
I was an object in a disrupted frequency. The problem of proximal
birds is its distal metaphors, because this was less figurative
than an act of transference. An object lesson in our attempt
at reasonable life, a shadow in a smaller shadow. Debt is a kind
of blood again, again. I didn’t want the theory of our end debunked.
Wasn’t there joy for the bird whose freedom was a hard bold line.
I have changed my life, ruthlessly. I fear I have already survived it.
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