Elizabeth Metzger

Pretend

Two gnomes sit in space and admire
how unnoticed they go.

Let me play the third gnome,

plant one flower
devoid of water devoid

of our one true sun, and if
the flower grows yes it grows

then the planet is a burden worth passing
between us.!50!Quick, quicker

we can make it seem
almost like lightness.

Honey, your somebody is home.

Elizabeth Metzger’s first collection, The Spirit Papers, won the 2016 Juniper Prize and will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in Winter 2017. Her poetry has recently appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets 2015, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.