Elizabeth Metzger
The thought
of all the grass

blown over to one side
hurts me. That wind

can do that. I must have
gotten to him first

though he pushed out against
the pouch in me

I now call soulless.
Of everyone I've met

on earth I always find
they got here first

and will they teach
me their good

reason for staying?
I would discipline

a comet against
my way of leaving,

push it out of sky after
sky and after

every loss on earth
the baby I was

would come back. That's
what it means to be lovable,

to give oneself whole
again whole birth

whole fist whole flower
but only what fits

harmlessly whole
in the mouth.

The baby comes and goes,
comes back to weed me

of my body, feeds my
bald birdies

what's not for me to know.
I had hoped all

my animosity toward men
would lead toward

safety in one who
would wake me before

I hit the wooden world
and rock me there

to say what violence
had not yet come.
from the book LYING IN / Milkweed Editions
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I think of this as my “birth poem.” I had often imagined that, in giving birth, the memory of being born would return. A second beginning. Despite chronological age, I often imagine others are older, planted on Earth before me, and more securely. Watching life emerge from my own body, from the same space one might locate the soul, I had to reckon with the shock of the present moment, the violence of Being, surrounded by the unknown. Time’s intimacy.

Elizabeth Metzger on "First Wound Kept Open"
Color photograph of Denise Lajimodiere, a Chippewa woman and North Dakota's first indigenous poet laureate, speaking at a podium
North Dakota Names First Native American Poet Laureate

"North Dakota lawmakers have appointed a Chippewa woman as the state's poet laureate, making her the first Native American to hold this position in the state and increasing attention to her expertise on the troubled history of Native American boarding schools. Denise Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians in Belcourt, has written several award-winning books of poetry."

via NPR
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Cover image of the cover of Laila Malik's book, archipelago
What Sparks Poetry:
Laila Malik on "the organic properties of sand"

"In the petroleum economies of al Khaleej (as elsewhere), there exist micro-universes of so-called expats, a blossoming confusion of recent arrivals and longstanding, multi-generational clans, the newly affluent and then those others who live at the porous boundaries of the less desirable micro-universe of outsiders, migrant workers."
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Pick a poem that you love, but that is new to you. We’ll call it Poem A. Print it out, triple-spacing the lines. Now, in the empty space between each line of Poem A, write a response line of your own—a line that responds only to that one line of Poem A, not to the rest of the poem. Once you have a response line for each line of poem A, discard Poem A and build a poem of your own made only from response lines. Serves One
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