Mother Nothing by Elizabeth Metzger

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You were placed like wings are placed 

as if they’ll never be needed to leave with 

but then you were born 

and each time I unwrap your diaper 

I consider every feeling you will hide from me.

When I wipe you I am touched with envy.       

*

You made the water you broke.  

You made me sicker than I could stand 

to live a little longer. 

For every night there is another night I’ve missed. 

Maybe it is my ambivalence 

about being outlasted. 

Whenever you are in your crib 

my life feels final, or like it has never been.        

*

You do not speak still.

Orange growing bitter within its skin, 

why would you speak? 

Alone in time 

pretending you can’t rot because you are held in.

Each word you say is still just pulp in your voice.

*

All night your long-into-life silence distracts me.

………………………….Are you there? 

Pleasure is the uterus contracting emptiness. 

Since you came, it asks 

What will ever be as good as holding 

a new life? 

*

If you were my lover I would beg you to speak speak

I practice a voice that will make you adult

but you are not my lover…………………..then

you are the mother I was always after    

lie back

desire is no longer inside me,

you are my

…………………………uncertainties

*

and who am I if not your 

practice man?

*

I could say your lack of babbling is not a drought 

but the river taking itself back. 

Ignore my mouth moving sound out toward you. 

You shouldn’t be accountable 

for what I make.

Reach for the bars instead, 

pull yourself along my night mind. 

All children grow into questions. 

You end 

but never as I left you.       

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Elizabeth Metzger’s second collection Lying In is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, which received the 2016 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed, which received the Sunken Garden Prize in 2021. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. 

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11 July 2022