We came with others where
we came alone.

Though it was world we never saw it whole.

There were seasons. There were senses.

Time called to space but the phone was
off the hook, old phone.

In a dark home an instant more by choice,
the body.

What else was instantaneous

the air
how we destroyed it.

God, or our last child
made to make ourselves believe in . . .
an excuse from language

what we couldn’t know,
how paper tears most completely once torn a little.

We were moving when we thought we were most still.

We had nowhere else to go.

—

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of 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 Quarterly Journal.