NLB Across Zones and Subnets

I have a VPC with a public subnet in zone us-east-1a and a private subnet in zone us-east-1b. There is an EKS cluster that spans both zones. I've deployed an Nginx ingress controller to distribute requests across my backend services that reside in the private subnet (zone us-east-1b). When the NLB gets deployed it creates a node and listener in both zone us-east-1a and us-east-1b. We are seeing intermittent connectivity issues when connecting to the service via the internet. I believe the issue is that when the connection is made the to the DNS record of the NLB in zone us-east-1b the connection is dropping because it's a private subnet and the routing table points to a NAT gateway.

Is it possible to deploy a single NLB in a public subnet and have a listener in a different zone/different private subnet? I want to route traffic from the internet > the NLB in my public subnet > the services in my private subnet that is in a different zone than the public subnet.