Jennifer Metsker

[Leave leave you say]

Excerpt from Psalms of Lament for Divine Imperatives 

Leave leave      you say
and so I run to the edge of the earth
where it meet the reeds and rocks       and think
I’d rather be inside.     If it’s true that you live
in the rock face of mountains
glaciers            activation pools               geysers
this is how a freeway can be                 a good thing.
It offers so many ways to get away from you.
I can never be the sky.  I can never be empathy
persistent.        I can’t be         a castle  or a basilisk.
You in my interior         speed by        all of my
forgotten dreams to thrust me into                  daylight
only to remind me that the time change is this weekend.
Can you help me move into my kitchen and put my hands
into silver basin of collapsing shifting ceramic water food
curdled tridents?         Because I need to do the dishes.
The conquest of tyrants in the shelter of your market
is on the radio again.   Maybe this is heaven?      But only
if the sun agrees           with the cabinets.
Jocelyn says to look for “it” in the middle of my
dream.            But I don’t know what “it” is.
She is sleeping on my couch.
I stumble down to see her curled up beneath
gray is the color of existence.   We can’t
get along          with every creature      because
when we meet them    we don’t know what “it” is.
But I remember    ocean sequence     Swami’s beach
in the town of Encinitas. To sit on the edge of a cliff
and close my eyes and listen to cactus wind waves
breaking into the system          as if you were
something we could all believe in.
Tonight           when I close my eyes
            I hear CDs skipping.
I need to buy more lunchmeat.
The wind is one mile per hour. Last night
it was sixteen miles per hour. I am gold. I have
something I like to hold          and cracks in my feet.

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Jennifer Metsker's first full-length poetry collection, Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, won the Editor's Prize and was published by New Issues Press in 2021. Her poetry has been published in Beloit Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Whiskey Island, Rhino, Cream City Review and many other journals. She has also had poems featured on the Verse Daily and the Poetry Daily websites and has had audio poetry featured on the BBC radio show, Short Cuts. She is currently the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.