The Better Seed

Some days it doesn’t rain anywhere in the world.

Everything is held back
and in the pause we call peace

like a seed making better
the little dugout from which it
left its badness

you scratch the inside wall of my memory of you
which is still wet with making.

What is too much about us already?

How I appear so much more visible
behind the shade of too much fluid

or that there are bitter and infinite voices
you must incorporate into your song
which you don’t yet have air for.

They don’t love you even if they help you.

About to crack another’s wholeness
you will drown my unmechanical parts

and I will be free now and then
to use an English word
I never used before you

on the other side of our dry beloved language.

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in November 2021. Her second poetry collection, Lying In, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. Her other books include The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), which received the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). She is a poetry editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read more at elizabethmetzger.com.