"Lush" and "Do You Like What I Was When It Was Already Was?"

New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review

Oil painting of roses by Albert-Tibulle Furcy de Lavault, Getty Images

As you may have heard, this Thursday, April 2nd is our inaugural print party at Hurley’s at 7 p.m. You’ll get to meet many of our talented poets, whose words will grace our pages. The party will also be a time to officially (or unofficially) meet all of our editors. In honor of our print edition, here are two new poems by Poetry Editor Vanessa Ogle, including “Do You Like What I Was When It Was Already Was,” which will appear in the print issue. See you all on Thursday!

—The Editors

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Lush

Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces. -Middlemarch

I.

Shut the window to the garden!


When the paper blinds you had 
crinkled just so, not enough to keep light
out                                       	              or us—
 

When the blinds folded as accordions
were replaced—
 
          
          Not the cold room, chill in summer from
                        constant air…
          Not the empty apartment sans couch,
                        us long on the rug your mother mailed
                        by the cardboard table you painstakingly
                        constructed when you looked at me
                        and whispered
                        my middle name…
                        We’re czars, you said, Nicholas and Katherine.

II.

Now complex curtains hang,
(inverted Georgia O'Keeffe Above the Clouds I)
        	with just enough variation you say as I think it,
        	something that would be flowers in the Midwest intentionally skewed    	
abstraction
that means
              everything’s curated—
 

And I can’t see out the window anymore,
        	        	  
                    
                  just assume it is closed. 

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Here is the poem that appears in our very first print issue

—The Editors

Do You Like What I Was When It Was Already Was?

Sometimes—most times, maybe—it feels
a woman is constituted by what time makes impossible to keep,

the disintegration of self heightening with that precarity
for the moments that exist when the appearance of something, its acknowledgement,

signifies what is already gone, like children looking at a star that is dead,
illumination of the past a reality that is false as it happens.

I look at myself in a mirror next to him and his reflection looks so different from what I see.
I think of the time I’ve wasted,

looking at men, this one with a head like the moon, myself alone
in the planetary echo of wanting to feel love in the craters of a new reality.

Two of the white flowers in my neighbor’s pot have turned pink,
unseasonable heat. (He—the man I used to want—loves the heat

but keeps his room ice-box cold.) The pink of flowers, so beautiful, are a sign something’s wrong. Time. Decay. Dangerous conditions creating beauty to the untrained eye…

Vanessa Ogle is a writer and educator. She is the Poetry Editor at The Metropolitan Review and writes Class is in Session and Comedy Distant.