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Elliptical

   



Breathing is hard inside my life …

My essay is about sound is really about pain …

The possibility of societal crumbling, then …

Even at age six I worried the well of original song topics would run dry …

That the future would flail to a selfsame sound …

They’re gonna put a bomb in the middle of our garden …

At the grocery, a sign asks me to Give to future babies …

But I can’t even live inside one zygotic line …

To admit I’m even a bit obsessed with one thing …

Obsession is excessive (and exclusive) …

So I set the trap for myself at the end of the field …

Run to it like a clueless like a clamp …

It’s not lost on me …

My heartbeat law is: I don’t like when my heart palps …

A round and yellow little leap …

I give the fear to myself, tenderly …

Drawn into the obligate garden …

Graceful as a DVD menu song on loop in the clinic waiting area …

They said I was a lossless file …

Jolting out jolting in …

Phone trilling underwater …

Nothing surprising: an action menu …

Listen carefully because your options have changed!





Kristen Steenbeeke graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellowship. She won Indiana Review’s Poetry Prize and has had work in Electric Literature, second factory, Bennington Review, Tagvverk, Catapult, Sixth Finch, and others. She lives in Austin, Texas, and copyedits for Texas Monthly.