"Flowers for Edith" and "Where There is Only Sound and Light"

New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review

Antonio Mancini, Still Life of Flowers, Oil on board, Getty Images

When are women celebrated, and when are they isolated? How do they balance creation with selfhood, or find belonging in a society that often whispers about rather than welcomes them? In these two poems, Justine Defever and Christine Degenaars explore the crux of womanhood from different vantage points.

These works remind us that life is ultimately about time — who wastes it, who takes it, and how to reclaim it. For women especially, time can feel like the enemy, particularly when it is lost or stolen. But must change always spell decay? And is reclaiming one’s identity necessarily a subversive act? Who, after all, ever fully fits in anywhere? The interiority of a life can both expose and conceal.

Defever infuses life’s poignant turns with humor and lush language, a poetic mix of sensory detail and wry expression reminiscent of Diane Seuss. Degenaars, whose debut collection arrives this year, transforms a seemingly ordinary medical exam into something otherworldly. Together, these phenomenal poets summon the uncanny and profound from domestic beauty and pain, leaving traces that outlast the reading itself and reveal the everyday as stranger and more fascinating.

—The Editors

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Flowers for Edith

The tittering biddies in town
walked along State Street whispering,
That’s where she lives. All alone in that big house. 
Terribly strange. Never married, of course.

Maybe Edith had that comical indifference in the 1940s.
I saw it once in my great-aunt Ida after Holy Communion.
In her Sunday best, she laid on the horn and flipped off 
parents blocking the street for photographs.

Maybe Edith strode downtown with revered elegance—
kitten heels matching a taffeta clutch,
making small talk with town eccentrics 
before meeting up with the gals at the Opera House. 

I sit with her at Lakeview Cemetery 
between unkempt evergreen shrubs.
There’s no one left to leave flowers 
for the spinster socialite.

I ask, Edith, did you ever wonder if your soulmate died young
and that’s why women like us wander like homing pigeons
with all the remarkable memory 
and capacity for love with no perch to land?
Did marital woes of best friends make you realize 
you were, in fact, looking at their lawn all wrong?
Did you mourn the bloodline ending on your watch,
or did you shrug and sip your chardonnay?

I chisel moss from the serifs on her grave marker
using the key to the house where we share an address.
Unwrapping dormant earth, I push iris rhizomes 
into the soil with my thumb.

We must be meant to stumble upon 
the template we need to see.
My kindred spirit can plant peonies
around my stone someday.

Justine Defever is an Associate Professor of English based in Michigan. She has worked in higher education for over a decade and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University. Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, Great Lakes Review, Kelp Journal, and various anthologies.

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Where There is Only Sound and Light

The ultrasound screen at NYU Langone Obstetrics & Gynecology is as dark 
as the light years of space between Earth and Proxima Centauri b, our closest planet 

with any hope of water. It’s an exoplanet, harbored in the habitable zone,
it dances around a dwarf star from 0.05 AU away. The probe that will be 

inserted inside me is a spaceship barreling through battered flesh. What could 
live here? I’ve spent four months as a body alone, twelve

if I don’t count the brief visitor. Only twice did I sing him Joni Mitchell, 
captive on this carousel of time. It was almost like he was never here at all. 

Twelve months empty. The probe enters. What might keep life away 
from Proxima Centauri b is that it orbits a flare star—unpredictable, rash, 

it increases in brightness for moments, then dims. 
It would make anything that tried to live there a broken shard of ice. 

The nurse finds the baby in me—plays the heart, a loud hopscotch rhythm 
in double time. I count the beats—six, eight, ten. 

The photo of the curved spine makes my child more a bean pod 
than a baby. I, too, bend into me—if I can touch her, I can make her stay

this time for good. A decade, scientists estimate, before telescopes catch 
sight of Proxima Centauri b. More, before reflections of starlight off its hidden 

ocean might be seen. To be secret is to be safe. Deep in the dark here, 
I make a promise, a plea, but it’s just between her and me.

Christine Degenaars has work published in Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Epiphany, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She was nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize and in 2022 was selected as a semi-finalist in the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She graduated from Hunter College with a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. Thin Glass, her debut collection, will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025. She lives in New York.