For My Parents

By ELIZABETH METZGER

 

Make the house leaves. Make the windows impenetrable. 
I will climb from underground with my dry bark heart
still pulsing for you

the old rhythm of dead humans once painted
just as freshly not breathing as my first day
outside paradise.

If I could thank you still
it would be for your obliviousness.
I got to keep the child you wanted.

What are needs when there are orange leaves exploding
from the roof. Here from the top of the earth
no fire would be built to make me forgiving. We would

never have to stand upright again. Four feet. Four hands. 
Bellies hanging with branches. 
Make the love that never had room for me

then stay alive 
the remote between you blinking.

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, Lying In, will be published in 2023 by Milkweed Editions. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

[Purchase Issue 24 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

For My Parents

Related Posts

Cover of This Interim Time by Oona Frawley

What We’re Reading: July 2025

SEÁN CARLSON
Frawley revisits memory to anchor her love and affection for each of her parents as she knew them. With precision and tenderness, she flits between their real and imagined pasts, her own bifurcated sense of “home,” the depths of friendships, and a shared dislocation and community found alongside her immigrant neighbors.

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.