SPRING/SUMMER 2026
Echo of the Air Around Me and Other Poems
Elizabeth Metzger
Echo of the Air Around Me
In June I married a shell and filled it with myself
expecting to be loved by it
held it to my head & heard the sea
made the bed & breathed its brine
cooked it lemony fish & cleaned the dishes
polished it with the underside of my T-shirt
When I placed its cold ridges on my skin
it let me whisper indefinitely
nightly monologues about our future
sometimes regrets
One day I placed it beside the vase
under a painting of a cloud
to be admired by our few guests
as they entered
We had children who filled it too
with rowdy laughter & silly theories
& they broke the vase
& the shell chipped
In June I held it to my head
screaming I could return you to any beach
but it was myself I heard crying
myself I heard leaving
Fugitive Love
Wandering away from my children to sulk
in the Rodin sculpture garden,
of course I find company in the agonized.
But it is the lovers that catch me
as our daughter laughs in the distance
and you call her back to you, Beauty.
Maybe I am possessive of her life,
which sometimes I feel still stirs
like time inside me, or the idea
of my own future. Examining the lovers,
how they grip and twist, cradle
each other’s weight, I obsess over
the creases of their unembarrassed faces.
His straining limbs extending from her arched torso
create a gap. I enter their ecstasy—
as if by choosing stillness they might move
real flesh around me, and I will never have to beg
or admit my longings. Old linden trees
sweep light around, connect shadows.
I hear our daughter shriek,
the way she does when she is hiding
and can’t help it. You pretend
you can’t find her. I keep staring
through the tangled bodies, afraid
to return my gaze to the bronze surface,
return to my family. I wanted no one else
but you to be my children’s father.
What the lovers have that we do not
seems obvious, even in their sculptedness:
the space their intimacy makes for escaping.
Every Thought Is Experimental in the Body
When I woke I was wet, and a rooster in the tree
by the window behind me was our infant crying
not for me, for the sun
in the middle of the night. How could I help him?
It is so confusing to fail him repeatedly
and remain engorged with wishes
like a lantern whose genie resents not being needed.
My husband tucked in his own life’s ruins
whines in dreams he will not tell me,
back turned against me then toward
and against me. He tends to me by forgetting
because the pillow’s a rock on which a black hen
might sit with six babies under her feathers, guessing
which sounds around them are dangers
and which are mothers, pent up like she is.
Nothing is sure here, where the land is darker
than the night-sky, and clouds at this hour
are exhausted, where every once
in a while the flames of torches still ask
if my pain is my protection.
Even my husband’s feelings about me
are questions I both ask and answer, none
of us knowing each other enough, or
if protecting myself, I will ever get past
the touch of my own hand.