Won Exit

 

In one or two lives

I opened the door with the prize

only to find the prize was not worth the life.

I wanted the door.

Brave mahogany door, you be my fortune.

Teach me to understand the jungle cry

in your grain, the suffering circles

by which your tree wisdom is known.

I was superior with handles,

gentle with thresholds. Then, this.

Choices at morning hours I usually skip

but there is a little cash flow of beauty

where there is almost no more water.

And there is not room and light enough

to stand behind the second

and listen anymore -

I am going through the language of me now.

I am flipping open the dictionary of myself

with my tongue, as if that were possible,

to find your first word.

In the torture of a foyer

doorless for entering, I am entering none.

Elizabeth Metzger

Control Feast

 

Either you’ve died, or you arrive

beside me at a funeral

patchily reaching out

from your zero gravity chair

to grab the relative achievement

of my stomach.

There is no cute life in me

but I have eaten a great meal

alone successfully, greater

than I have ever kept down before,

full of iron and clotted cream.

I cannot feel everything about you

anymore the way I used to—

the stomach overfills itself so fast

it eats the hunger and the mouth.

I grow enamored of you as an egg

you shake in my direction

then love you evenly, without belief.

 Elizabeth Metzger