Three poems:

 

The Exquisite Hoax 

Sir of the sayable as long as it is sayable

you promise to unfurl
a heaven where no one believes us.

“Mine” takes the shape of what is over,
stars more civilized than clear.

Before the fate cascade
I touch up the blindstamped lettering of “Yours.”

What light is to the eyeless
we are to the lonesome.

Neither of us can get out of earth’s way.

 

First appeared in The Iowa Review and most recently in The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)

*

Interior Where No One Notices 

 

THEY TOLD ME to stay away from the sill
but I raised the pane and slipped one sparrow
black and shivering into my mouth. I kept it there all evening,
wetting its wings on my tongue, letting it peck at the vault
of my throat. I could taste the color of lava,
contagious and bitter. An hour when light goes
and the room grows a wall and even wood
becomes restless. It wept in the middle of my mouth.
It sharpened my breath into little teeth
for knowing. It was loveless. And I would not have
trusted anyone. After, I was thirsty all the time.

 

First published in Narrative Magazine, and most recently in The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)

 *

The Eclipse That Quenched the Ego 

 

Fold yourself inward, world.

Draw me a map of all the missing
rivers you dried,

a star-thread species
nobody could keep in the grave.

Harness me here
between then and then,

a bother of space,
artifact of dark.

It used to be chaos
was a kind of quiet.

A mountain let itself down.

Make me the woman composed
in her own face.

Gather your thunders in my skirt.

                                         

First published in Narrative Magazine, and most recently in The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)

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Elizabeth Metzger is the Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. Her debut collection, The Spirit Papers, won the 2016 Juniper Prize and was recently published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poem-a-Day on Poets.org, Boston Review, BOMB, and Best New Poets 2015. Her essays and reviews have appeared in PN Review, Southwest Review, and Boston Review. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

“I often think of poems, of writing, of words as surrogate selves. The poem-self is truer than any “autobiographical” self. This made artifact, this etched voice captures not one facet of a self, but the cusp of a moment of being. Poetry satisfies me because it involves that translation of inner to outer, that contradiction, that revelation this is who I actually am…no, this. And poems of course are objects in time, which is something I love about them. They’ll evolve and change beyond the page, beyond myself and my intentions.  Poems are the voices in our heads. They are selves to try on.” (modified from The Adroit Journal)