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.