If You Are Born

Corey Zeller & Gregory Sherl

First published in Salt Hill 30 (2013).

If you are born it is out of some dumb rambling, footsteps upstairs in a room where no one lives. You are a lesson in mild-mannered optimism. A lifetime of hair undresses you, speaks some, downs itself with its own lowlife noise. If you are born, humming, it is to reach, to stammer, to wait long in lines when they form. If you are born, it is to a half-life. One side touches a dark breast and the other pulls the water apart like a shark. All things, even you, are filled with a million beady black eyes that see everything and nothing at once. A statue made of bats, holding its hand in the air for no reason at all.

Corey Zeller is the author of MAN VS. SKY (YesYes Books, 2013) and YOU AND OTHER PIECES (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015). His work has appeared in PEN America, The Academy of American Poets, Verse Daily, Kenyon Review, The Colorado Review, BOMB Magazine, Indiana Review, McSweeney's, Gulf Coast, and other publications. He has held editorial positions at Mud Luscious Press, H_NGM_N Books, Salt Hill, and Ampersand Review. Most recently, he taught creative writing at Syracuse University.

Gregory Sherl is a poet and novelist currently living in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is a Grisham Fellow in Poetry at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of three collections of poetry, as well as two chapbooks, and a novel, The Future for Curious People. His poems have appeared in literary journals both online and in print, including Columbia Poetry Review, Sixth Finch, Redactions Poetry & Poetics, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, PANK, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Versal, The Awl, and Poets.org, among others.