Autobiography of Eve

Wearing nothing but snakeskin

boots, I blazed a footpath, the first

radical road out of that old kingdom

toward a new unknown.

When I came to those great flaming gates

of burning gold,

I stood alone in terror at the threshold

between Paradise and Earth.

There I heard a mysterious echo:

my own voice

singing to me from across the forbidden

side. I shook awake—

at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt

to freedom.

Ansel Elkins

is the author of Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she was awarded a 2011 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Elkins was raised in Talladega County, Alabama.