two poems
by Natalye Childress
take me into the light
sky-high frantic, euphoric. fuzzy as i
boost the mainline. i see and feel it all. don’t
open my eyes; i want to see colors i know:
orange grove, orange cap, blue tip, absence of. just
another responsibility, another dream, where
outside it’s snowing regret. forgotten, i’m
anonymous, newly twenty-one, desolate and going
for broke. hands on the planchette, but
— i’m threading the needle in the eyedropper, i’m
threading the needle in my vein. gonna
map my chronology, thread it in the groove. i’ll try
to write the next great american novel. for
somniferum, the epigraph will say, tribute to my kingdom
come. one where my skin will flush, come
forth with warmth, blood rushing as if
to escape erasure. i hear you, anti-hero, say “i
can’t believe…i’m alive.” but we all can.
le scaphandre
locked in, lingering, you dream of the pyrenees. in the room with a view you can’t access, a window looks out on the birch trees that line the english channel. in bed, you lie and blink, but in your mind, you invert the mountaintops, form underwater trenches along the depths of the opal coast. you were raised in the first, by the lakes of tuileries, among the lilies in l’orangerie. in your memory, éve au rocher shimmers, her bronze flecked with patina of green. in your periphery, the world passes you by, one letter of the alphabet at a time. but in the stillness, you unlock its endlessness, the night full of possibilities. the color of sea breeze, the reflection of a glacier. you travel to the ends of the earth. you’re the hero in every greek myth you were told as a child. and on and on it goes. it’s only in the morning when the chapel bells toll that you’re reminded of the cord, umbilical, unseverable, connecting you to earth.
Photo of Natalye Childress
BIO: Natalye Childress (she/her) is a Berlin-based editor, writer, translator, and sad punk. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears or is forthcoming in wildness, Anthropocene, Don't Submit, Half Mystic, Burial, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter (https://x.com/deutschbitte), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/natalye.bsky.social), or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/natalyereads/).