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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