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Rushi Vyas
I find you in the basement / suspended / pulse

                 bare / though I keep reaching / for your carotid
                 your neck / the cold throat / I roll

outside / away from your corpse / numb to the scald

                 as Labor Day suns the black drive / I walk backward
                 two days in time / into the park / mindless where I stumble

near a cicada / kicking / stuck / dying

                 lift its shell from the puddle / try / to warm it /
                 in palm / I do / all I could / but / all I could

fears the spine / the crunch / the nail

                 between fingertip and neck / the unflinching / thin
                 exoskeleton between rage / and vulnerability

I gave my entomologist friend / your body

                 to hang behind glass / mounted on her wall / there
                 below the jugular / a rope / tied to my larynx

I do / all I could/ to drag through tar

                 and haze to your funeral to discover / enough /
                 if this rope will slacken / or choke

or break
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What do you do when you find a body that once belonged to a family member now absent? What is to be done with a grief that will never be "gotten over" but that will embed itself in the bodies of those who remain? Can you escape? No. You breathe. Then, as a teacher once told me, you dig a hole. This poem helped me start digging. 
Spotlight on Taylor Byas’s I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

"Taylor Byas is just now releasing her debut full-length poetry collection, but she’s already making a case for herself as a literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary."

via CHICAGO MAGAZINE
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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Dumanis on Natalie Eilbert's Overland

"The word 'overland' connotes an arduous journey, a direct engagement with the environment and the vicissitude of nature. Broken into its constituent parts, 'over land,' the term is also the root of global disputes, why nations go to war. 'Over' can mean about, but also done, finis, kaput. But this is more a book of journey through life than despair at it."
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