E.A. Hilbert's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Writing, The Boston Review, LIT, Pleiades, The American Scholar, Fence, and the William and Mary Review. The poetry editor for Random House's online literary magazine Bold Type, he lives in New York City.
Depressionism
Digitalis, digitoxin and digoxin, foxglove—
Without light to remain it is forceless and corrosive—
Black reports directly to dimension and octave—
Little one, the darkness is all around us.
I Can’t Sleep Without Pills and It’s Cold
I caught pure clatter of bone, glassed-off skeleton,
Strove to rush crosswise overnight,
Found myself nailed hard to a starbelt,
Until all left of my ice was air.
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Comas
This is a function of seeing
Accused without antecedent
Cherish not comfort but light
Something unfolds skies deeply
In a grotesque funnel
Or is it a cage
The swimmer still breathes
Broken when the faint star turned sideways
The experiment continues
Ash is stuck down on crystal
A milky lava laid across the sea
And still you don’t comprehend the contortions
Watch the canticle turn to counterfeit
Coins in fixed rows
Resembling accidents too broadly
Massed to behold
The script-writer drew two limiting points
Postulated starving dancers in a silent stadium
This unmapped terra firma resembles
A medieval system of vapors and scars
This is unstoppable
What tapers downward and hurts so much
What blanked edition has been passed
Along a frozen white rail
What outcome transmits boundaries even
As it matches incipient organisms against sunspots
What is not injured after this hardest of falls
What is free from staircases
Scattering its orange blockade
An ornamental obstruction in the process
Of shifting downward
Glimpse into a lenspiece
The architect will be ascertained beneath a peeling stile
They are not monstrosities and
Are content with serenades and menstrual floods
The walls are wetted with seething granite
Fissures grow out in the lustrous
Vicinity of your childhood
In time glaciers will align to every point of the compass
And leave perforations rather
Than words to guide the eye and the heart
Your poems will be taken from you
In the same diurnal curling that grieves me as well
All of your entanglements will slow to a horrifying finale
A pure signal is made known in a broken sieve
Flint and egg-shells blow up in the dawn like feathers
The flexure is sightless
Naked and dripping in the greasy spray
They witness the fleets
As they tow their dull grey tonnage
In from the horizon
You are not immune
In Seed Time
Glint of cracked black and seething streams
Killing a figure that followed us for centuries
Images fracture in acrid lather over the highlands
What arrives commences and demands
Summer swings its hot flashlight over
The wrecks of seas timed and freed
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