ella bartlett
IOWA, MOVING PARTS
Sickness is a song in March. Bibles
are brigades lined up on shoulders
and lies, they are believable. Iowa: leave
me alone, and I won’t have to keep
leaving you, or keep you from biting
the sides of the next pink quilt baby
my friend left in her car. All part of
the inescapable fits of a short half-life. We
forget the oaks at their birthplace,
seething the concrete and waiting
for the echinacea to flower or to be
ripped out of the ground by a child.
For the bicycles to run over the weeds
in the cracks of the sidewalk, carnage
and carnival. Sky in bitters. Trust
I will lift off the lid, watch some foreign
insect fly out.
Ella Bartlett (she/they) is an Iowan-born, New York-educated, Paris-based writer and translator. The recipient of the Gigantic Sequins Poetry Award of 2021, judged by Arisa White, Ella’s work has been published, among others, in Jet Fuel Review, decomP Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Rust + Moth. For more, follow @EllatheRewriter.