The Source
for 天野
Early summer.
Under park trees
a Mourning Cloak butterfly
flickers an ellipse
over the sunlit patch of grass
where you are laid out, reading
where I am watching you read
your shoulder, your being turned
to the page. It settles beside you
like your notebook
—open, forgotten.
You are a statue with hair
a breeze runs fingers through,
still as a word
I could peer into for life.
The wind starts gently
to turn the pages of your notebook up
onto your elbow: one, two,
catching on a blank page
what will be written there
and onward. It’s all unfolding
the future building against your arm.
It flutters but does not leave.
I vow to stare into the source with you—
hold it open—never look away.
Wings, thin as paper, shiver.
Stay.
Forthcoming in Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends.
Angel of Rorschach
Plecoptera nymphs graze in the benthic zone of rivers and lakes for up to 4 years before emerging. Adults live a few days to weeks. Presence indicates well-oxygenated, unpolluted waters.
You—a stonefly splayed in the film of the shallows
still, beyond struggle—
await the gilled mouth of God
wings make a sky-top cross, cast amber halos
down on the rocky town
of your adolescence,
a blurred symmetry of wings passing
over streets and gardens
where once you scraped among your people
never knowing what anyone would see
in you, wings folded away
until the day they split from the back
and you rose, beat them
beautiful against your moment
then fell, Angel of Rorschach, back
to the human plane
where nobody could
ever pin you down, just gravity
pulling your wings
all the way open
Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice educator, activist, and multidisciplinary artist. They were a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their poems can be found in the likes of PINCH, Nimrod Journal, New Ohio Review, or in their chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) which explores judgment in intimate relationships. They currently live on Pawtucket land (Arlington, Massachusetts) with their husband, where they are completing their first full-length collection about parent-child conflict, healing, and love. Find them at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.
