Two Poems

Eben Bein

regret. We sincerely

Thank you for your vision and interest. After careful consideration of the many, highly qualified candidates, the pool has been narrowed. We sincerely regret to inform you, we will not move forward with your application.

Thank you for your position. After sincere application, the aforementioned interest in your vision has been qualified. In accordance with our needs, your consideration will no longer be forward.

We are sincerely received to inform you of your aforementioned quality. Regrettably, the application of our vision has not been a candid narrowing. You will no longer be interesting our highly considerated pool.

We thank you for our decision. After careful qualification, we sincerely apply the you to the narrowing of our needs. In affordance with our position, we sincerely regret to inform you, you are no longer moving.

-

Object Impermanence

after psychologist Renée Baillargeon

It’s prewired. Hopeless.
A grainy experimental reel
of a three-month-old
still getting the hang of
her neck. How she follows
the toy car along its track,
bobbles a double take
when it speeds unimpeded
through a wooden block,
stares for telling seconds at
a door swinging open
to reveal the capricious chair
has vanished.

Father Piaget said she shouldn’t
know yet she knows
years earlier than he
ever suspected: the occluded object
should continue to exist.

Hopeless to hope
you could ever know permanence
is the illusion, sureness
a block with a hidden   hole,
and you the subject
      or object
that vanishes


Eben E. B. Bein (they/he) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. They were 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their poems can be found in the likes of Nimrod Journal, New Ohio Review, Crab Creek Review, or in their chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit 2023) which explores judgment in intimate relationships. They currently live on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with their husband where they are completing their first full-length collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. Find them online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.