We at The Metropolitan Review are excited to present new work by poets Jamie L. Smith and Jenna Breiter. These poems explore life and art through observation, examining how our spaces, work, and emotions drive us toward introspection, whether wistful or objective. What items — strange or ordinary — make up our environment and universe? Which objects resonate with us? Do we constantly seek ourselves or others in our surroundings? These questions can sustain our pursuit of what it means to exist when time is finite.
Thank you for reading.
—The Editors
Astronomy Moonrise over ocean horizon. My father teaches me to shoot photos through a telescope, craters and ridges rise like pockmarked skin beneath a fluorescent light. This was now. I loved the night lilies. The tigers, too, that grew in my father’s garden, the way something was always awake, waiting. ~ I gathered worms and black swimming beetles from the backyard pool into jars of water. Look at them dance! I told him. They’re carnivores, he informed me. What did I know about cruelty then, how accidental it could be? ~ My father gives me a thimble-sized light on a keychain that flashes morse code for SOS if you turn the head counterclockwise. For emergencies, he says. It was his. One night I try it in a dark parking garage, let the strobe guide me to my rental car. Spinning the lens, the head detaches, and out pops a small pale pill, a tiny moon landing in my hand. ~ The Big and Little Dippers, Those are us, I told him. Ursa Major and Minor, he taught me. Soon after that first night at my father’s house a telescope appeared near the lilies. That one’s not a star, he told me, that’s Venus, the orange hue coming into focus in the viewfinder. My favorite star, really our nearest planet. 24 million miles away. We learned to love each other through space. Decks of constellations left on my nightstand. The stars he hoped I would arrange into Orion’s belt scattered haphazardly across my ceiling. The telescope I tell him it’s okay to sell. What wouldn’t I give to close that distance now? Jamie L. Smith is the author of The Flightless Years and Trojan Horses: Voices from the Opioid Crisis. Her work appears in publications including Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, An*dyne, Palisades Review, and elsewhere.
Carousel Animals Before Restoration Laid on their sides, my gloved hand to torso, chin, neck, the other with pick. Giraffe 4A is nine paint layers stripped, neck narrow between fingers a two-grit sandpaper routine ear-tip to frozen tail flick—Horse 2C with his left hoof crooked, muzzle tucked and Cow, who I sat before and found empty—a wooden facade—like the boats in separate wings at the Met. Reassembled, built after arrival—or were walls cut open to float each into position and how many gloved hands helped guide. Jenna Breiter is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY.
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I’ve always loved that painting. So amazing for that time (at least to these eyes).
Thank you for both of these