CD Eskilson
CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator living in Arkansas. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright/Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is forthcoming from Acre Books.
Survival
Somewhere in 1944, in the Ardennes outside
of Bastogne, my grandfather spends Christmas Eve
crawling half-buried through shrapnel and snow.
He drags frostbitten feet as he scrambles up
earthworks, passes by crushed willows
while deafening flashes scar above him.
Other boys swallowed by light shows. Years later
he retraces each inch he had dragged
himself before bed—a terror I struggle to picture.
The first time my lover blew up at me
and every time after, their hands bruised a frontline
down the field of my back. Rage a singed
muzzle jammed into my brain. I’ve crawled
down in trenches to maneuver through razing,
hugged the floor while debris rained above.
When I walk down my grandfather’s hallway
I shudder passing what once was his room.
I know how war comes at night in a dream.
Nocturne Entering the Age of Fishes
One of those nights when your now-ex decided to call
and you tended the blame for what was wrong all
sewn at your feet, that field with each sorry you’d let grow
throughout high school and into college now
while phrases like enby and soft butch and she / they
burned on the Xeroxed pages of readings to say
sound familiar? though it was hidden from the now-ex
who wouldn’t go to a trans march, shut their eyes during sex
because of how pretty and girlish you’d gotten at school—
what if you don’t answer? Offer silence to that cruel
voice and its echo that has turned inside you so long
that want’s so impossible to hear. You walk among
the oaks lining campus, pass the quad and Greek theater
and keep going, trek way back in time until saltwater
cradles each animal, each lungfish with globular bounds.
Here bodies are morphing and creatures’ sounds
garble: the placoderms, toothless for now, click a greeting
while trilobites chirr at your nameless shape. Fleeting
fins and ditched shells all float past you in a soupy sea
where transition means thriving, your surviving is key.