“This century swings from its golden chain” and “With voices restricted by knees, boots, batons a red moon sings”
This century swings from its golden chain
Hands behind heads, bodies undressed and walking
Who traces what’s left of your lips? this village, this hospital, this wedding?
Who vocalizes this despair? A child
dreams of falling through windows or holes in the floor
a car so full they are left in the road
Corridors narrow into stricture and it becomes difficult to breathe
A primary teacher recounts the moment, this is when we go under
the rubble. A first responder the night he could not clean the brains
of children out from under his fingernails
Late capitalism advances, our planet heats up,
checkpoints flatten tongues, surveillance pushes pins
into amygdales. Girls become mothers and mothers go on mothering
the dead still trailing like ducklings. Hands don’t know if release
can be experienced after they’ve been zip-tied
Ears, if they can hear anything after the silence
that follows a blast wave. There is a line of white
busses, an open window and a man
leaning out, reaching to touch
someone who is free
and remembers their name
With voices restricted by knees, boots, batons a red moon sings
Interrogation finds its power
Dogs gather the shadows
by dividing reality
of women
into smaller and smaller aspects,
and women
assembling a machine
the eyes
one is told to enter
of the dead
How a state fails to protect us
The dead gather
can be determined
the wind, rustling
by autopsy. Until then
trees and trees
with a mind uprooted,
the memory
the body, persists
of water
Hands given guns
Water gathers
detach from consequence
the blueness of
just as bodies
waves and waves
given uniforms
the sorrow
reinforce directives
of migrants
The stateless cannot rest,
Mothers gather
and the stated impose
the shoes of
nostalgia. As if
their children
history was filtered
and children
light, and maps,
conditions of
authored by god
suffering
In our streets paramilitary
Fathers disappear
improv. Each troupe
like water from its bed.
in full costume,
Lake bed.
each player ready
Creek bed.
to kill you
River bed
Masked men
In the mouth of another
precede
my tongue.
mass graves,
In their words,
and mass graves
their phrasing
precede
my heart, a blood-
denial
stone, proof
Eliza Rotterman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Oregon Literary Arts. Her chapbook Dirt Eaters was published by Tupelo Press in 2018 and was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. Her poem “Tulips” won the 2026 PSA Emily Dickinson Award. She lives in Eugene with her family and is a neurotrauma ICU nurse.
