Roach

By ELIZABETH METZGER 

The quickness of living.
The quickness of wanting to kill something.
Forget dreams, they attack me and
I welcome their landings.
Kiss me again without being asked
or asking if I do love 
as a gas mask filled with all our unsayable
thoughts. I don’t know 
how to possess an exoskeleton,
earth kitchen, their shiny
brown god’s house, guts hollowed.
I don’t know
what marriage means at 2am
with six or seven roaches vying
for my mouth, and other
openings. If someone handed me a
microscope I might wake up.
A microphone I might stop
and listen. If you’re not breathing 
on your own 
by the middle of this lifetime
it isn’t worth the privilege of lifting 
your feet. I made you. I make to lay myself 
out like a sticky trap
safe if safe the exterminator says
they are checking 
out the new smell of our baby
in the holy sliver where 
our bodies don’t touch. 
I don’t think he would hurt them 
now that he understands 
them. I don’t think you would 
hurt me though I’ve killed you 
so many times either. 

 

Elizabeth Metzger is the author ofThe Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbookThe Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among other places. Her essays have recently appeared in Lit Hub, Guernica, Boston Review, and PN ReviewShe is the poetry editor of  The Los Angeles Review of Books’ Quarterly Journal.

[Purchase Issue 17 here.]

Roach

Related Posts

Hall of Mirrors

November 2023 Poetry Feature: Virginia Konchan and Gabriel Spera

GABRIEL SPERA
Gracefully we hold each other / architects and optimists / always at arm’s length like / congenital dreamers / tango masters slinkily coiled / bright candles in a hall of mirrors / whatever I propose you propose / to conquer repeating and repeating / the opposite.

a golden field of wheat

Thresher Days

OSWALDO VARGAS
The wheat wants an apology, / for taking me this long / to show my wrists / to the thresher boy. // Finally a summer where he asks how my parents are / and my jaw is ready, / stretched open so he can hear about them, / easier. // I may look different after, / I will need a new name.

People gather in protest in front of a building; a man (center) holds up a red flag

Picket Line Baby

AIDEED MEDINA
White women give my father shaded looks./ Bringing babies to do their dirty work,/ mumbled in passing. // I am paid in jelly doughnuts / for my day on the boycott. // My dad leads my baby brother / to the front of the grocery store doors / for a meeting with the manager.