H
ad you left
me alive, I would have killed
a rabbit for my pleasure.

Our proportion of skeleton to fur
would make me sure at least
of being animate.

The pelt, dead and bristling,
might guard me from death,
a city wet with the rain of better places.

Rubbing the skin so hard into my skin,
it would have been the gentlest thing.
It would have been a better brain.

My vanishing is a meadow
and I know my kill still moves
more or less disturbed,

every leap blowing the shell
off my deformed blue-lipped bud.

I would work myself into the dirt if I could stay.

Listen:


Elizabeth Metzger
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her second full-length collection, Lying In, will be published by Milkweed Editions in the spring of 2023. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Find her on Instagram @nobodytoo2.