Philip Schaefer
Remedial Sunburst
Blazon. Night a vox
for counter parts:
my brother dying
in los angeles.
Counterfeit cocaine.
If we stomach. Swim
through the bottom
of the 5th. Vocabulary
ravenous. Our gums
white piano keys,
our thumbs sliding
hymns along them.
Here is my straw:
hold your breath.
We say thank you
with thin blood
thank you lucid
man in clawfoot
tub making love
to the suds. Oh
to drown wholly
in your arms, morning
never opening full
the red womb
of an aster, slit disaster
pinching out the mouth
of the earth. A storm
before the glowing calm.
Philip Schaefer is the author of three chapbooks. [Hideous] Miraculous is available from BOAAT Press, while Radio Silence (forthcoming 2016 from Black Lawrence Press) and Smokes Tones (available from Phantom Books) were co-written with poet Jeff Whitney. Individual work is out or due out in Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Forklift Ohio, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, H_NGM_N, Adroit, Vinyl, and Hayden’s Ferry among others. He tends bar at a craft distillery in Missoula, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana.
Return to January 2016 Edition
Blazon. Night a vox
for counter parts:
my brother dying
in los angeles.
Counterfeit cocaine.
If we stomach. Swim
through the bottom
of the 5th. Vocabulary
ravenous. Our gums
white piano keys,
our thumbs sliding
hymns along them.
Here is my straw:
hold your breath.
We say thank you
with thin blood
thank you lucid
man in clawfoot
tub making love
to the suds. Oh
to drown wholly
in your arms, morning
never opening full
the red womb
of an aster, slit disaster
pinching out the mouth
of the earth. A storm
before the glowing calm.
Philip Schaefer is the author of three chapbooks. [Hideous] Miraculous is available from BOAAT Press, while Radio Silence (forthcoming 2016 from Black Lawrence Press) and Smokes Tones (available from Phantom Books) were co-written with poet Jeff Whitney. Individual work is out or due out in Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Forklift Ohio, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, H_NGM_N, Adroit, Vinyl, and Hayden’s Ferry among others. He tends bar at a craft distillery in Missoula, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana.
Return to January 2016 Edition
