*a poem by Elizabeth Metzger – from The Going is Forever, a collection of poetry to be published in 2025 by Milkweed Press. more about Metzger below this poem which illustrates – to me – a fresh and female view of being a parent. You can read more about her journey to motherhood – which like so many women was complex and difficult – here: https://www.conjunctions.com/online/article/elizabeth-metzger-04-23-2019
It’s his fourth birthday again in the land of forgetting.
Humongous balloons sway and pop in the wind.
The trick candles pop and sway as I pass them in front of his breath.
I have such a sweet tooth for family I deny he is missing.
Regression means he is closer to where we made him.
Thin mist from his first night home from the hospital still haunts us.
Sometimes I sleep in the position I was in when we made him.
French-blue curtains in the guesthouse lit our skin blue.
Sometimes I hang off the bed for an hour after,
longing to return to his birth or before we made him.
It’s his fourth birthday and the candles trick us again.
A few balloons re-inflate from their shiny torn skins. Impossible.
The mist hides nothing, leaves us. Ordinary sky closes in.
I am so afraid I’ll leave then haunt my family, I kiss and kiss them.
If he were to forget us, would we still be the ones who made him?
*Elizabeth Metzger lives in California, where she is the poetry editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Metzger is the author of Lying In (2023, Milkweed Editions), as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review,andLiterary Hub, among others.