Oldest Story Ever

Carolina Ebeid

After Teresita Fernández’s Nocturnal (Horizon Line), 2010, solid graphite on panel

The first of January. And it’s old outside, it’s the oldest day so far on record, though no one seems to mind. We kiss on the lips in the afterparties. There’s very little difference between the tongue of a man or the tongue of a woman in the dark, or between the hypnogogic and the hypnopompic transport into / out of sleep. Both are a threshing-hold, both a trek toward the gray gray expanse of seawater. Sometimes the view of a person walking toward the sea is nothing more than a study in devolution, how some biotic urge in the medulla oblongata wants to reverse, wants to backhome, to sink, to fin out the body and reach ancestral forms. O but gray alone, such a color is rarely useful. The sea is more bloodgray, murkgray, more wirewool in hue. Call it noxtouched in hot weather, silversmithed in cold. The color turns semimetal dim under lit moons. As in tonight—the sea going graphite. An entire history of extraction shining there, archive of earliest pencils— good for marking sheep. (What will you draw for me here?) War graphed map. Inward war. Write again the lovers into the leadblue tomb. Begraph them, begrave them. Read it to me.

Carolina Ebeid is a the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, Fall 2016). She is a student in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and more recent work appears in Linebreak, Bennington Review, jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone House Reader.