Animals: Two Poems by Eben E. B. Bein

Mrs. Funnynose tugs my cuff

The cruelty that earned her
that namesake was clearly left
on some far away farm because
what a pig can do
with only joy, a lake,
and seventy percent of her nares
sends bubbles from my shins to my shoulders.
She shoves her whole face under
a snort-bath, an ear flapping flatulence,
a reed-trembling burst that she stops only
to take the damp denim hem
of my pantleg in her muscular lips
and tug—Oh if you insist Mrs. Funnynose
I will sit to tea and mudcakes
with you, soaked to the drawers
in the warm shallows
of this pink, cloved,
round-bellied afternoon.

Monsters

If I could speak Fishing Spider,
I would ask how to step softly
onto that perfect mirror
which bends but does not break
beneath each hair-hooked foot,
how to feel for the ripple of fins

ask this one
on the dock by my bare foot
how to pluck a bubble from the air,
a silver diving bell to wear
about one’s abdomen,
how to drag a fleshy tailed thing
to the surface in strokes of eight

ask her, bending closer,
about devotion. The hunt
that left her seven-legged.
It was enough
protein to spin a silky pearl—
her egg sack—tiny moon
against the graying wood.
She carries it

like a kiss,
future clutched
in her chelicerae
and scuttles between slats
sprinting sideways
along the walls
from the earthquake
of my kneeling.

About Eben E. B. Bein

Eben (he/they) is a high-school-biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the "WritingXWriters Workshop," winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest, and has published with Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, Passenger's Journal, Columbia Review, and the like. They are currently completing their first collection “From the top of the sky” which explores the weave of parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with some ivy plants that are not dead because his husband remembers to water them. FB/T/IG @beinology