Monika Zobel

A Metaphor for Half

I’m already drunk with sorry sounds. 
Treaded the weather. Like the birds 

above the ocean. I can’t wrap my head 
around that grey matter. Call me whatever 

you read first.
My childhood in search for trees. 
Houses haunted by nobody’s home. I feel like 

the last flu. When I saw you at the post office
envelopes didn’t know what to say. Prayed for 

the dark. I’m confused like a family tree. 
Each of my characters to travel a bit further. But I'd 

rather not feel my hands again.
Without hands 
call me a protagonist in your story. I started 

reading in braille. I can feel whispers 
even after I fall asleep. We are starting to look 

like the accident
, chalk lines on the floor. Chalk 
lined this morning. Turned and dragged to sea,

I feel otherwise. At the beach kept an eye on the weather 
wave at me. This is the last thing on the transaction. 

It's a classic: I don’t want to live anymore—
but it’s too late. You're part of now. We all come to

where the world hates me. According to legend, 
if you cannot sleep, simply run away. On the train 

against humanity I think of drinking early. Call me 
your metaphor for half. The waves a dance choreography 

involving things I forgot. I may let you remember  
me by the scar on your foot on glass.
What if I stayed 

in this poem and squashed a gnat on the word 
god? I never wanted to be your shoe by the roadside.


Monika Zobel is the author of An Instrument for Leaving, selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize and Das Innenfutter der Wörter (edition keiper, Graz, Austria, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Entropy, Nimrod, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review and elsewhere. A Fulbright and Djerassi Resident Artists Program alumna, she lives in Bremen, Germany.