Poems and Texts

“Mammalian Egg” by Elvia Wilk

Eunsong Kim & Elvia Wilk
Friday, April 26, 2019
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Mammalian Egg

In the category of creaturely being
poems and organisms are sisters
coiling and uncoiling
in rival writhing blooms.

A gulf opens as doom cracks a
careful egg. Breach, breach!

Back up. Solid egg rolls to a stop, taps a stone,
two eyeballs spliced like a mirror’s joint.

Pierced, wounded, aroused, panting, bleeding, sucking,
languishing, exulting, enlarging, and diminishing,
basically going “all the way”
full of hot drool, eyes the color of a lung.

The drop of drool that loads the cup over
easy, over careful—a care full of egg
tussling with ghostly tremors,
some alien taint the color of a lung.

Descending negation:
the marble chips itself away
over centuries, over easy times and fucking miserable times,
over and over, flop and flop.

A second birthing, an over birthing, so over birthing
particular creatures, that is, whereas the category
of creaturely being coils over
the cup that boils over
then rubs Vaseline on the cracks at the corners of its mouth
parts, split and lick,
what is not, not ourselves.

He opened his eyes and saw nothing
but the cracks at the corners of his own eyes,
those lovely and those nasty tools.

There are four meanings of nothing;
all of them relate to god
and none of them to the eye
which always has a standpoint, a problem,
a simple care and twin.

There is no problem that is not a problem to someone
like the tempting myth of vision, the eye that fucks the world.
Careful, egg: don’t overburden the encasement,
the superessence, the hungry essence,
the essential of the shell ecstatic.

Elvia Wilk

Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She contributes to publications including Frieze, Artforum, Flash Art, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, and die Zeit. Her first novel, Oval, is forthcoming in June 2019 from Soft Skull Press. www.elviapw.com

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