Jennifer Metsker

excerpt from “The Exiles”

1.

Because you make meaning and meaning is the thing you make.
Into meaning descends the fray. The fray is specific but hypothetical.
The hypothetical becomes the object. You do not know if you desire it.
To have desire is to assert that an object exists. That you exist.
Existence is not the same as desire.
If you want to desire an object, you must tell it to be what you cannot have.
Like the objects that wind up on your coffee table. You must sift through them.
You might also be an object. It’s hard to tell.
It’s like bracing for a car crash when there is no car involved.
You did not die today, but perhaps you also did not live.


2.

The body is an object. It will alert you when you die.
Dying doesn’t always involve violence. Dying can result from disinterest.
If the body is disinterested in objects, it experiences a death of desire.
Desire perpetuates life the way high fashion perpetuates beautiful models.
But too much desire is unattractive.
We must desire to be unattractive if we want to truly live.
Now is the time to close your eyes and focus on death.
Death might not be the final state. There is no way to know.
All you can know about death is that it remains a mystery while alive.
After death you are still an object, but your objecthood is more obvious.
If you were made to feel like an object in life, death will be a relief.


3. 

Life is a fight against metabolization in favor of persistence.
If you stand, when you stand, you will still wonder if you can persist.
Lately you are lying down.
Lying down implies a small death will occur. The death of sleep.
In your dream, you are in an airport. You cannot find your ticket.
You fight so hard to get on the plane.
In life, you hate travel. You cannot imagine a place that will bring you joy.
If you cry about this, you will not stop. Do not engage in ordinary sadness.
All objects contain an ordinary sadness. There is only joy in being lost.
You have never felt lost enough to feel joy.


4.

You felt a slight joy once when you believed you had been found.
It was the way someone spoke to you. They carried on as if they understood you.
You thought they loved you even though you are not a beautiful object.
But you had too much desire. You became too unattractive.
In the end, it didn’t matter. You desired attention and the desire was mutual.
You fight against this outcome the way that theories fight against each other.
But the enactment of desire means you will always get what you deserve.
Which means you deserve to be born, to be an object, to want to be carried.
This conundrum will take you centuries to understand.
Your biggest worry is that you will forget what you have learned.


5.

You worry that if you stop feeling pain, you will not understand it.
But you do not speak of pain because no one will understand you.
Halting speech should not be a metaphor for fear.
Let’s call it survival then, not fear.
Even breath is a diatribe. Always arguing, just silently.
Complaints are breath too. Only you file them with offices.
In offices, where you find yourself, you will find yourself alone.
And in office meetings, you will discover that decisions don’t exist.
Decisions are a privilege reserved for entities you cannot imagine.
At one point this was all just continent or sea.


6.

If there is an afterlife, you hope it doesn’t contain holidays.
Repetition only intensifies your distaste for seasonal displays.
Or changing leaves or flowers that die or anything too nationalistic.
The last thing you need is an obligation to remember time passes.
Thus you return to your own solid confusion. It’s a stone with no name.
A stone on a beach. A skipping stone that tears the surface of water.
Why must every act remind you that you disrupt a millennium?
Your objecthood is evidence of every counterintuitive action.
Meanwhile, objects must be washed. Objects must be discarded.
You are an object. You must be washed. You must be discarded.

Jennifer Metsker is the author of the poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, which won the Editor’s Prize from New Issues Press. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit, Rhino, Birdfeast, Gulf Coast, The Cream City Review, and other journals. Most recently her work can be found in The Dialogist, Four Way Review, Pigeon Pages, and THE SHORE. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.