“Oh it is worth being dust,” writes Elizabeth Metzger, in her poem “Into Her Future.” She’s talking about a particular kind of dust, the kind that takes pleasure in its own dispersal and oblivion:
I am scattering
all over the land, all over the bodies of women
that are dead
and not born yet.
Elizabeth’s disembodied voice gleefully defies the physical boundaries of the living. Relieved of the obstruction of a human form, her dust (the ashes of the dead—or death itself?) can finally infiltrate the sensory states of being both everywhere and nowhere.
In a new episode of Multi-Verse, Elizabeth and I discuss the uncanny opportunities afforded by putting on what Seamus Heaney called the “death mask”—that is, writing from a posthumous perspective. “Into Her Future” takes the reader into a strange, destabilizing territory of unfinished business, a limbo where the cycle Elizabeth describes as “multiplying and rising again and not being fulfilled” perpetually repeats. An erogenous zone? A nightmare? Elizabeth herself calls that disembodied voice “both the midwife and the provoker.”
Listen, and let the dust have its way with you.
“Into Her Future” can be found in Elizabeth Metzger’s forthcoming collection, The Going Is Forever (Milkweed Editions, 2026), now available for preorder. Buy the book! And if you can’t wait to read “Into Her Future,” you can also read it online at 32 Poems.
Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe for free on Substack, Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, or the Multi-Verse website.
