Illustration by Anne Le Guern

Listen:

          Don’t you miss me as if I were dead?

That’s how you’d like to be loved.

To be forgotten then
remembered in a god’s red fleece
too big for either of us.

What would you do
if the world started gathering
like snow
shoveled by your own demise
and I was nowhere, sheets tucked in
(hospital corners), for
several elusive afternoons.

I have been at rest
for years myself, hearing humans
I’ve made and will make, domesticating.
Meanwhile, you’ve earned birthday tea
and my loving surveillance.

I was certain such darkness as ours
could be lit
by the right explosives
at the wrong distance.

Just before my flight back
you were passing cattails from hand
to hand to demonstrate

what sister-love could have been.

Elizabeth Metzger

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her second full-length collection, Lying In, will be published by Milkweed Editions in the spring of 2023. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Find her on Instagram @nobodytoo2.