ESSENTIAL TREMOR
Hell is just the clapper of the bell
that announces you
are no longer the beloved.
The world turns out to be one humid mediocre day.
I take a machete to a tulip.
Where death is something you can fuck up
the broken heart rolls three blank dice.
The psychic says it says a lot.
Everything blushes but my ego
now dumbed down for “sleep.”
A crowd of phenom-hermits
expects a planet to arrive.
I hear in heaven
the angel has a harelip
and she is willing to watch you shake.
—
Elizabeth Metzger is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University and an instructor in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Her work received the 2013 Narrative Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Narrative, Tupelo Quarterly, H.O.W. Journal, The Common, and The Los Angeles Review. She is an assistant poetry editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
