Auden Eagerton
Caroline
I can do this trick
where I imitate your smile.
We’re identical, it’s not hard.
It’s something to pull out at parties, a joke.
If you don’t look like you’re signaling for help
with your eyes, I say, you’re doing it wrong.
Mostly I do it to understand.
I read somewhere that we are all
trying to return to our mother’s bodies.
Our mother is an axe
swathed in barbed wire,
and really, you were my first home.
Isn’t that what I’m doing
when I steal your face?
I dig into my cheeks—
I once gave you a compass
so you could always find your way back to me—
try to exhume the last time
I was your dead reckoning.
There’s an ending where we both got out, once.
The sac collapsing,
it was the first time we would suffocate
under our mother’s unending sky.
We were ripped into light.
where I imitate your smile.
We’re identical, it’s not hard.
It’s something to pull out at parties, a joke.
If you don’t look like you’re signaling for help
with your eyes, I say, you’re doing it wrong.
Mostly I do it to understand.
I read somewhere that we are all
trying to return to our mother’s bodies.
Our mother is an axe
swathed in barbed wire,
and really, you were my first home.
Isn’t that what I’m doing
when I steal your face?
I dig into my cheeks—
I once gave you a compass
so you could always find your way back to me—
try to exhume the last time
I was your dead reckoning.
There’s an ending where we both got out, once.
The sac collapsing,
it was the first time we would suffocate
under our mother’s unending sky.
We were ripped into light.
Biography
Auden Eagerton (they/them & he/him) is a nonbinary poet located in middle Georgia. They received a Bachelor's degree in English at Kennesaw State University and currently pursue an MFA at Georgia College & State University. Their work has been published in Across the Margin, Whale Road Review, Feral: A Journal of Art and Poetry, and other journals. Twitter: @AudenEagerton