In Their Own Words
Elizabeth Metzger on “The Shrieking”
The Shrieking
A voice, inhuman
We woke divided
by pillows, terrified for the children
Were they resisting their dreams, their bodies
in sickness, or a stranger
dragging them from their beds
The voice grew stronger until we were opening every door of the house
to find silence
before the shriek again
Both of us too afraid to open the front door
I pressed my ear against the bathroom window
where one neighborhood dog after another
started barking
The shriek grew fainter, pitch and frequency the same
I was not relieved
as it faded
not wanting it to leave us
someone dying we might have saved
or we’d never know
what tried to kill us
or how we found ourselves awake together
with my mouth wide open
From The Going Is Forever (Milkweed, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Metzger. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
On “The Shrieking”
“The Shrieking” explores a moment of marital “separation anxiety,” when the house still holds the couple together as they make the decision to separate. When people talk about divorce, they rarely talk about the last days of being together after they have decided to part. This may be one of the most private phases in a marriage, the intimacy of being alone together. It also feels unreal. To break a vow, for better or for worse, is to break a vision of one’s life. When the private domain is divided, it becomes prey to the public. The tense but intimate conversations to decide whether to save or end a relationship eventually fade into external voices. A choice to be together, based on a foundation of love, is ultimately reduced by others to one dreaded decision. “The Shrieking” seeks to reclaim intimacy even in separation.
The poem opens with a fragment that is inverted: “a voice, inhuman.” When the voice wakes the couple, they are already separate yet together. Despite being “divided by pillows,” the subject of the poem begins together as a “we.” Who is shrieking? This is the question or final mystery the couple must pass through together. It is unclear whether the sound is a cry for help, a death rattle, a birth pang, or a predatory warning. For all the life the couple has shared, the poem is an almost ending, a period of sharing a departure.
The first thought the couple shares is fear for their children, those who will lose their original sense of family, and those who will forever keep the couple together as parents. Maybe it is the voice of romance departing that leads them like a phantom through their own home, through each other. Or maybe it is the risk they are about to take. Though the voice is threatening, the desperation to find its source is also a longing to hold onto it.
Unable to fall back to sleep, I wrote this poem in bed on my phone. The lines came quickly but with pauses, as if I were still in the rhythm of our recent quest around the house. The movement was more important to me than landing on a meaning, just as letting go of a marriage involved holding onto its many possible endings. I thought it was the drama of the unknown shrieking that I wanted to capture, but it ended up being more about believing the experience had been real.
As a result, I labored most over the poem’s last line. Maybe that’s why the poem became the book’s beginning (the first poem of the first section). Originally, “The Shrieking” ended with the penultimate line. That felt inconclusive, but each time I added a line, the poem felt misleading in its conclusion, willing an answer to the question “how we found ourselves awake together.” Eventually, a last line emerged in which the “we” dissolves into “my”: “with my mouth wide open.” The couple wakes together yet apart. The porous border between sleep and waking becomes the border between marriage and separation.
Is the speaker the source of the shrieking or is her mouth open in speechlessness? Maybe discovering oneself after a long-term relationship means listening urgently for an unrecognizable other. The poem’s last unpunctuated word “open” opens a sequence of endings that demand ongoing beginnings. I think of all the subsequent poems in The Going Is Forever as shrieking from the mouth of this poem. Whatever the shrieking means, the mouth is surely human.
