Natalie Eilbert


The Sun Is Shining

A freight train exhales a distant era I’ve never known

as a skinny squirrel scavenges in my driveway. It keeps being

the day again. The weather so goddamn pleasant. Roofers

hammer at a 45-degree angle and I attempt to locate

unnameable birds that shape the trees with their chirps.

I have always wanted to die. A robin hops along the leaves

and I google, do birds have knees? I have exhausted my

presence again. That I am someone else’s warm body, I can

only laugh. When my father passed out in the kitchen,

he reported his wife calling his name from the top of a well.

When my mother watched her husband faint, she shook

in her new knees, her sutures still scarring. His pupils drained

of color, she told me. My brother coughs and wheezes elsewhere

for air. I touch my cheek and close my eyes. Dowdy life pushes through.


Natalie Eilbert is the author of Indictus, winner of Noemi Press's 2016 Poetry Prize, as well as the poetry collection, Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from POETRY, Narrative, The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 NEA grant recipient and a former Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow. She lives in Chicago, where she is attending the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a focus on climate change and environmental justice.