By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2025-03-26 14:07:32 | Updated at 2025-04-03 09:29:47
1 week ago
Flesh has a thousand sons but I have one.
He plays with a pig’s rib
he has gnawed all the gray meat from.
How do you know it lived a long enough life?
how do you know it won’t come back
angry?
He holds the slick bone
vertically up to the dining-room mirror:
There is a pig begging
to be boy and flesh.
He rides it into the sunset at the speed of forgiveness.
All the pig energy in his face, he examines
my nervous fluorescence
afraid I will answer his questions and fail him.
He is staring straight through only himself and he knows it:
Would you kill me if I were delicious?
Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going Is Forever will be published this year. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches writing at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y and elsewhere
