X NIHILO
You’re akin to a kitten on fire. Your hair harpoons
black barb & lily irons without release. Release
me. Late at night the neighborhood ducks huddle.
I polish my nails with tar. I read the ceiling for progress,
purpose. You’re somewhere in this dark
Sistine Chapel dancing with an ice cube on your tongue,
a Molotov cocktail & the lit matchsticks your pupils become
when the sky goes blank with sin. I don’t want to be
in your room again. I bury myself in the spaces
between spaces with glue & a dirty cue ball. I land in every pocket.
I cannot escape the wet dryer sheets or the Polaroid of the treasure
map of your forehead. Tell me the one where the clay pigeon is tossed high
& the rifle is cocked & I’m the bullet & you’re the shatter & the sun
fiddles the song that creates beauty out of such a loud nothing.
ABOUT THE POET
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won
the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won
contests
published by The Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has
also been
featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of
America. He
recently opened a regionally focused Mexican restaurant called
The Camino in
Missoula, MT.
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an
opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of
poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors
from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to
hear it.
No comments:
Post a Comment