Elizabeth Muscari
Elizabeth Muscari is a poet living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She holds a Master of Fine Arts candidate from the University of Arkansas. Her poetry most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Booth, The Texas Review, The Nashville Review, Muzzle Magazine, Waccamaw Journal, among others. Her poetry is the recipient of the 2022 Felix Christopher McKean Poetry Award, the 2023 Walton Family and Carolyn F. Walton Cole Poetry Fellowship, and the 2023 John and Shirley Holmes Award for Creative Nonfiction. For more, visit her website at www.elizabethmuscari.com.


Eve                 


First there was the wood. And the sun a hot knife tearing
black dirt. From it, burled force: dagger sprouts and white
teethed vines. Birds and bees beside four-legged counterparts.
A woman knowing the world for the first time. New things
invited her to wonder, then to ask what they could offer.

That morning, I writhed in the bathtub. Biting cloth, inhaling
blood and water, I wrung red. Ribbons exited between my legs
like eels. I pulled the wad of pink out of me in a white breath
and salted lips, loosened it from my hand on the porcelain.

I looked at this body and wondered my place in it, thought
of the rot I had grown. I listened for my name in the drain’s
growl and threw all of my sorry words into it. She and I
understood it the same: everything dying with us, in us, from us.
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