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eva alter

@evaalterpoet.bsky.social
34 followers 39 following 5 posts

my brain is a forest my poems are maps that index encrypt & resurrect

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D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Mail day! it's the new @evaalterpoet.bsky.social from Eulogy Press
The cover of AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES by Eva Alter
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eva alter @evaalterpoet.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
3 years ago, during a dark night of the soul, I wrote this story about self-punishment, obsession, and dissociation. So happy to see it out in the world. Truly couldn't have found a better home for it than Citywide Lunch. citywidelunch.wordpress.com/soma-sema-by...
citywidelunch.wordpress.com
“Soma Sema” by Eva Alter.
November 1st It’s November and so it’s my Lent.  As the microwave clock hits midnight, I watch wine drip from the glass in my hand onto the ground as if I’m standing fifteen feet away. I squin…
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eva alter @evaalterpoet.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
one of my pieces was accepted by scaffold omfg??????
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eva alter @evaalterpoet.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
Awesome! I'll submit then :) thank you!
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eva alter @evaalterpoet.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
@rustandmoth.bsky.social hi! Your bio says you're open for submissions until March 31st, but your website says March 21st. I wanted to check if I can still submit or if I need to wait until June! Thanks!
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eva alter @evaalterpoet.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
twin poems "Passenger" in @maudlinhouse.bsky.social (maudlinhouse.net/passenger/) "Kismet" in Eulogy Press (www.eulogy.press/kismet)
Passenger by Eva Alter

At fourteen, acutely and newly voiceless
I became preoccupied with the basking shark.
From an animal family typecast as

vicious and soulless and yet itself chiefly
passive, it is a creature of pilgrimage,
traveling far and slow with the brackish

seasons and tides. How analeptic, I 
thought, to drift from place to place
without affliction or care. At fourteen,

the basking shark’s liminal, perpetual
fate as a simple tourist on this Earth,
its life predetermined as transient,

stirred my jealousy and fascination.
Enduring what felt at that age like limitless
suffering, I imagined myself drifting

in the vast seawater for eternity, thoughts
aimless and opaque, so close to oblivion—
yet still entirely corporeal and spirited.

Little to think about, little to harm me.
Just that endless and boundless ocean.
Open and certain as a void.Kismet by Eva Alter

“because a woman’s body
is a grave;”
Dedication to Hunger, Louise Glück

I learned how to do it at            fourteen, 
                    that brutal undoing 
of desire—         a violent purification 
ritual, my own; 

to rid myself of my person,
temporarily              yet entirely

                              [to rid myself of my soul’s detritus]

that porcelain door going nowhere 
but down          down           down.

I knew I was septic.
Knew my skin had been
                   made into rot

                                 [knew I had to bear it anyway]

and decided to barter my fate
               sacrificing myself to that chasm of 
        dreck.

Once became dozens became thousands
          
            each time an unwitting move
   in some cosmic chess match against
   God’s magistrate;

total expiration the loser’s reward.
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