Two Poems by Elizabeth Weaver
Accidental Landlady
I won't correct you when you say I'm living
in the basement, although I wouldn’t prefer
the cellar, either, that unusable space reserved
for spiders and centipedes and a hundred
other beings, none of them me, some of them
bearing fur. Not to mention palmetto bugs
which don't fly; they “glide.” This ground floor
is only a step below the world, and that's where
you'll find me when I'm not working
down inside this house's bowels, where
systems breathe and water clicks notches on the meter
and the gas will never hiss, I hope. In winters
the furnace blazes there, snakes
of electrical tubing reaching between the century
old beams, across which I also reach
in search of rust and wet and dry
rot in the insufficient light
where I paint what cannot be
seen. I believe but do not
know if what I do
alone, in the dark, does anything
against the invisible trickle from those
in bright apartments, making
its way toward me and then the central drain.
Pest Control
At the Rodent Academy, they teach us how to fill holes
and hide our food, how to disguise
the sound of trickling water. The clues awaken at night
and grind their teeth. That very velocity, just
one rodent running across the sidewalk—stunned
by a human boot—could launch a thousand
ships of rats to the farthest parts of the world. Here
if you empty a space, something will live in it. At night
you only hear the enemy. That, or in the morning
you know by the feces that it leaves. It's true, they're wanted dead
by every neighboring faction—but no one wishes
to find the bodies or hear the armies of them
filing down incisors beneath the streets. In the end I'll want
to know where the poison is, and if you have some weapon,
I'll thirst for that. Unsure of what anyone has
died of, there's no way to name what makes us live.
Elizabeth Weaver's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Journal, The Paris Review, Plume, and elsewhere. Her full-length manuscript, which largely deals with her experiences of growing up in poverty, was a 2023 finalist for the National Poetry Series. She holds an MFA from Columbia, has taught as an adjunct at many colleges and universities in the larger New York City metropolitan area, and is now a member of the full-time English Department faculty at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY).
