Punk Will Never Diet
You are the archangel of Nothing That Ever
Fell. Drop an anchor past lips and you’ll stay alive
to sing in water. Set the species to strips of light.
Let them be touched by piano hands, poem
sparse as a baby grand in the palm
set to detonate the branches of trees clenched
in fist. Stigmata watercolor tips
drain thirty days of sunset because somebody
sharpened your elbows
into knives that burn there. Set the spires
of the species into shimmering belts.
Lightning bolts teach them “I Love You” in Aramaic
and thunder. Hold tight
for self-possession. A ghost enters from
behind and slips inside you, exhale
a cherry blossom cigarette in a bomb. Call the
doctor, we’re going to learn
how to love this ‘how many milligrams’ and
‘can I take this with food’,
tell me, ‘are there side effects’ of trinity?
Your primary care physician asks you
to superimpose a figure drawing on his copy
of the Body Mass Index. You are
a 29.5 and he says, charcoal. You draw like
flames. Like flames, want the body
setting off a distant mountain range. Forest
fires give you something warm
and worth the tattoo. Your breasts are interrupted
by the sirens in the street.
We’re going to learn how to love this time.
Flowers for the night. Flowers
in her teeth. All syllables join together like her
morning. The clumsy fusion
of 6 am. This is not how bodies find each
other in quarter-light. The bones are baggage.
Drag the bag of skin from church to church.
The country home used to be a funeral home
on Menarche Road
and Reviving Ophelia, not a graveyard.
“Touch me until I can’t remember your name.”
By the time you read this, I’ll be so far away.
Somewhere, I am in here. Them.
I write for them.
Lines and Hooks
Yesterday was a bird with a beak like a stem. How beautiful her backside, shimmer as an oil spill takes to flight and gone. If gasoline rainbows could be worn in the body like accessories to the black, “I am here, will you watch me jack?” The girl with the body like a birthday candle burns lifelines back to palm. I mail her a psalm from the part-time heart that is best pinned to the clothesline. Then there is the girl you try to take to the carnival. She unpacks her chest and drops all the deaths to swim for themselves in the Chenango, the years of donating touch to anyone who asked. Grandma was the first to go. Doves should only be sold together and die in pairs. I am a blackbird who wants to be a dove but really I’m the brown eye of a dog and I’m trying to tell you something. Grandpa circled the apartment for nearly two years, fingering her sweaters until Hospice, until the 21 guns, each with a scar for a mouth like “hello.” I have a scar for a mouth like halo. The dog cowers and looks at the leash dragging her forward when she wants to just lie still. My mother’s glow swallowed itself into a hospital room I was nowhere near. Only shoulders know how to properly wear the rain. “Where did you go just now,” a lover asks. They always ask, except for when they’re not asking. Don’t ask. I mean, ask. I believe there are Gods here and they’re willing to turn around. I believe the house fire knows how to subtract in a different way. When I get root canals, I close my eyes and think of that field of infinite tenderness we dug with our eyes, gentle as the brown of dogs. I have a passport that is good for a decade and with it, I leave the Republic of Sadness on the Face of Water. The moon is a pale call girl. I am the moon. For 300$, I will place your hand on my heart. For 600$, I will place my heart on my own.
The Line is a Word
In one hand,
a lake.
Your face,
a mirror.
In another,
a lake holds
silhouetting sky.
Conduct
dredgings like
Salem potions
its imagery
into Gods.
Follow power-
lines past
the cry of grackles
to towers
that connect
disorderly conduct
of bird
and electric,
flutter and
fish leap out of lakes
in rings
on fingers
dragging light
in air
concentric
as a
Virgin Mary halo
in art to sky
an art on poem
in hand to
hands to lakes
on poem down
to recognize
hands
a trace,
stone sinking,
wind a trait,
translucent
fish or shoulder
of ghost
fishing
dredge the alchemy
of witches
mix heaven and
line break
bone break
follow rivers
of art to world
where word
is how you end
in gravel on
a good Friday
as in churches
they raise
hands
so holy
a cathedral
checks their
pulse
they should
feel it
pulse they feel
around some
other earth.
The poem is
talking to you
now through
the grackle:
Dirt is holy.
Your face
is a mirror.
You are full of lakes
and witches
and dirty
angels
mostly pages
of fingerprints
old loves
asking your
neck
to dance
and
someone stands
before you
someone
stands
inside
you
take the
mirrors out
let
the others
live.
EROS
Kind of Like Painting But I Don't Have One
It's kind of like lit. It's kind of like the flower that follows on the other end of lit. This is a way of saying that the sun starves itself out. It's pouring water glass to glass and knowing what to do with excess. This is how some people cook desire on the stove. I am positive that looters make the world a better hotel. I should know. Someone unlocked my body and trashed the place when I was out getting cigarettes to stink the day. A girl with anemia sucked the rust from the iron fence of my ribs and now she's well again. Alone is an empire I built by destroying an empire. When the hurricane built the shore, I knew it was just unraveling civilization. I have to stop writing about flowers and the waves I do not get. Those are your waves. Mine are the ones where you crawl across the floor and grade a paper, call that spring. Spring, I get motion sick. You were the blue eye of a fresco. I get motion sick. My eyes ride your breath strokes. You tell your mom about everything. Here are all the Gods you kissed and all the girls you didn't God. She understands every word because she's dead. My pulse finds yours especially when you don't have one. It knows how to hook in the night. My whole life is about that angle. I was never pretty until I rinsed through your hands. Now I am laundry. I gather the wet rag of sunlight. I draw the blue day into my spine. I collect glasses of light into dry. I collect glances of 'are you okay' into a bank account bigger than a tightrope. You drag a drink through your throat. It interrupts song. I am the mercury, bored with Fahrenheit. You are raining in the Amazon. I am dirty water. Pour me through a bra and keep the clean parts. We're going to be out here for days. My nipples are church steeples, piercing into the vein of a Starry Night. I want us to fall out of language now. Home is a bird. Let's follow it.
Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, Leigh Phillips is a poet, fiction writer and memoirist published in various creative and scholarly print and online journals; author of one poetry manuscript, "Naked in the Heartbreak House" and novel in progress, "Leaving Flagstaff: An Epistolary Novel in Verse."
