One of the First Girls on Whom I Had a Crush Was Named Hope
BY EMILIA PHILLIPS
I once believed in god, an intelligent design at least.
But I also believed my youth was for mistakes,
and so I kept a fake journal, in case I was ever called
into the principal’s office again to see Mrs. Wood
with her New Balance on the desk, her gray muumuu
slipping back to reveal a bunched ankle-socklet, white
as a symbolic lamb. More unyielding than Saint Peter
at the gate, she of course didn’t believe in saints. Or girls
having sex. And so I wrote my fiction in bed—
temptations conquered with my boyfriend and not
his bass-player’s fingers slipped under my skirt
on the band bus while coming back from
a game, his sweatshirt covering everything
like a well-made plan. But there were other things
I couldn’t admit to myself, much less lie about.
She was one of them—Hope. Sometimes I liked to imagine
her as an allegorical figure like Justice or Fortuna,
but, instead of the accoutrements of a cornucopia
and blindfold, her arms would be covered in disappearing
tattoos that constellated the classroom
daydreams of whoever looked upon her, and she’d hold
a radio antenna, a voice for the dark hours.
I bought CDs she liked, Blink-182 and Weezer.
We were friends, I said, and then we weren’t
so much when she became popular. And I was jealous
of phantoms; of her copy of Anna Karenina,
well-worn and foxed as the image of what could be;
the future like an unattended dance, the one
at which everyone else is. But our school didn’t
allow them. One teacher said girls could get pregnant
from dancing, and I remember Hope and I laughing
together, on the way to our next class. If she was a sentence,
she was a question I thought was rhetorical.
But the world really wanted to know the answer.
Poem About Death Beginning With a Humblebrag and Ending With a Shower Beer
BY EMILIA PHILLIPS
Today, for once, I did not think of Death. I avoided him like all men
in public by pretending to read, by putting in
my earbuds to drown out his I still need you, babys with Patsy Cline’s
I go out walkin’. I watched the unglued soles
of his black Converse hightops pass in front of the bathroom stall
into which I’d retreated when I needed to
decompress from teaching. But I didn’t say anything, only fished
in my purse for a pink clonazepam
that had spilled out into the bottom with all the pennies and single
sticks of gum. I have to take
this, I said when he later approached, and then I helloed into my phone
although it hadn’t rung. I tried to look busy
all day. I answered emails I’d been putting off and I even remembered
to say thank you for your patience instead of sorry
for my delay. I invited students into my office to ask about their summer
breaks, and I heard about a job
petsitting four dogs, two cats, some Sea Monkeys, and a snake. I asked
the student if she had to drop mice by their tails
into the hot tank. They were brown and frozen in bags, with freezer burn
on their noses. I remembered then
that snakes smell with their tongues, remembered one flick against a glass
enclosure. I remembered then what it was
like to be kissed by Death—his tongue like an old, limp carrot left too long
in the crisper drawer. Sometimes, I imagined
sticking it into one of those old-fashioned pencil sharpeners mounted
on the wall. The sizing guide, the little crank,
the shavings coming out in coils, you know. Once, when we were
together, Death forgot my birthday. I had
to plan the party and smear the cake with buttercream myself, but Death took all
the credit. He was often like that. A man
of consequence, some would say. He never laid a hand on me, but any time
I told him he had hurt me he would say, I don’t
know what you’re talking about. I began to think that maybe I was
making it all up. Maybe you are, he said
without moving his lips, and I began to worry he could talk to me
telepathically. That seems like something
Death could do, I reasoned. But maybe his voice in me was me too.
It sounded funny after all, a little off, like Bob
Dylan in the late 80s, his voice just starting to turn to wet concrete.
Most of the time, I don’t think
about Death, except when he drunk-texts in the middle of the night
or happens to run into me buying
milk. Sometimes when we’d make love, as he like to call it, I was too drunk
to say no. Sometimes when I was under
him, his sweat dripping off his brow and stinging into my eye, I
would think about a woman and how she tasted
after we walked around the city for hours, finding every excuse to delay
returning to the hotel room we could
barely admit we had for reasons we couldn’t say aloud, even to one
another, even though we both knew.
Today was a small triumph. As I said, I didn’t think of him at all. But I can’t
say he wasn’t there. Isn’t still. Here in the muscle
after I’ve undressed. In the brown bottle at my lips, in my hand on my breast.
And in the steam I inhale.
The First Boy I Thought I Loved Was in a Band Called Romanticide
BY EMILIA PHILLIPS
after I broke up with him He used to call me
dumb
as a way of flirting A man came
uninvited
to the house the other day
and I stood
on the other side of the locked storm
door, the dog a low
growl at my heel The man pleaded
for me to open up
and take
the free gift of laundry detergent
out of his hands
so he could show me what else
he had My father told me
to always be in a position of leverage, to maintain
a range
of motion so I could always turn
away or into
an assailant’s grip and get away Lately, my husband
has been sleeping
on the sofa and so I’ve learned
how to
stretch my body out as far as it will
go to the mattress
corners to take up space and dream
of her
who made strong the wound by honoring
the tenders
car that men are
always reaching out to touch without
asking and asking, did you
get that in a cat fight, sweetheart without a question
mark at the end because they don’t care
about the answer only
that they define the violence I was followed by
a car for ten minutes and at a traffic
light the passenger leaned
out his window and yelled, I’d love
to pound your cunt to pulp
while my buddy rips your ass
apart Some mornings when I wake
I think I can
unthink my body, to make it salt or sand—
my head the top
chamber of a halved hourglass
spilling
into the wind, but I’m trying
not to violence
myself as a way to protect this
will make a kind of tongue
should mine be pulled out,
I think while looking at the end
of my soft-worn belt and not at the blue-scarred abdomen
in the mirror in which I dress.
