Nathaniel Bek

W O R D S • I D E A S : N A T H A N I E L B E K

Memoir of Clouds

I have unmarried my longing marrow From this tethered choir of skin This autumn of molting Gallery of cicada wings Is it time to discard this earthly husk

I have littered our conversations enough With parts of my body Given my all to this rustic moon This vengeance of shadowed beds Or all that I have put to rest

Your nameNo longer hibernates in my cheeks & isn't this a death worth burying & isn't what we had A type of always

A practiced waltz of funerals We made of the night Of our voices How I gave the strongest parts of me To you

The first time I abandoned myself I was 10 16 21 27

Is age just a number

OrA collection of goodbyes we keep celebrating

The first time I abandoned myself Is a lie I let linger in me now A still reminder Of all the mirrors I have become Shattered returns of an echo A kaleidoscope of bladed selves

I remember the first time I clung to anything that Was not my blood & I named it love & what is love if not something We can touch inside us & what is touch If not everything I have opened with my body & what is an opening but-

The sky This God of unending sunsets How every day is a sort of death We keep accepting & every morning is a return A stammering palm of lungs

These anxious gifts Of fleeting song This orchestra of internals I have known to harden This memorial of muted fauna I keep grieving

I hold a photo of a child Palms adrift in question A teddy bear An eternity of permanence Between them The boy The hand The lush abundance of soft welcoming

Did I ever touch it

How removed I am from this Doppelganger of benign beginnings Even now in my thirties Hands outstretched in the vastness Of my own learning I am a metropolis of vacant children A chasm of vanishing clouds A still calm of disjointed shadows

I wish I could splinter this unloved delicate into me But this photo is no longer a form of ownership & I am no longer a form of this boy

In its place My first memory is The tractor The cowboy The knife fight

Maybe if I try hard enough This tractor can be a metaphor For growth This cowboy a long noon survival This knife fight a form of severing The long from the dark

Maybe I can make a cemetery of failed Beginnings These memoirs of preserved smiles A covenant This poem An oath To avenge all that I have given This skin This blood This ripe meadow of love-me-nots

If this poem is a promise Then let it be to myself To you To everyone I have ever buried

Let it be of a tree I take back from the ground Let this poem be everything that moves A startling of melodies we claim & claim again for ourselves How I want to name this my body How I want this to feel like forever This caged existence we call skin Where everything I have touched Has touched me A night so vast it never stops speaking An answering of wishes we cast out Of the dead & everything leaving Like an un-numbering of stars that Keeps expanding Burning Into this great unknown Of fragile existence

Nathaniel Bek is a writer and artist from Northeast Wisconsin. His work can be found in Phoenix Magazine, Eber & Wien, Narrative Northeast, and was the 2020 recipient of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Book Award for his debut collection Atrophy of the Boy Who Became a Wishing Well (June, 2021). He can be found curating the wind online at NCBEK Poetry.

Website: https://linktr.ee/ncbekpoetry IG: @ncbek _poetry