Leigh Phillips
Dear New York City, Learn Gentle
The sky regrets itself. By sky, I mean me.
Don't let yourself get lost
because you think someone's going to find
you. The story goes: no one's
going to find you. You're going to be on the
highway sifting Mountain Dew
bottles full of trucker crank piss and trading
them to eye‑wild tweakers
for a ticket back to tender. You are what is
tender. By you, I mean me.
The song goes: Heart. Ribcage. Envelope.
Heart. Ribcage. Envelope.
About Sleeping Women
3 AM, the time when “nothing
good happens”―stars splinter
everything; the chapel's
forgotten its God.
I want to go out there:
where a hand pumps the spray
and out comes art or 'urban decay'.
Insomniacs with tiny vacancies
for heart chambers
cruise the strip for something
with legs.
There is nothing left
but vibration―I am sidewalk fare,
where suburbia stops at midnight
when I start: this poem. That cigarette
after four months in the clean.
A handshake reaps a bag of glass
and a dollar is the currency
that unmakes the happening
of every dollar.
Nothing here is deadened in daylight,
by the sun's cruel habit
of illuminating everything―
the stoop trash is supposed to be there,
this is the new regeneration
and I'm the transfusion
of the blood, that bubbles and boils
in the streetlight hum
and the thrum of desire that builds
in breast and bursts in song.
It is when I want to walk.
When conversations converge
over Waffle House coffee
and two lanes merge on I-81.
A truck's taillights pass
through morning. It is here
I remember it all, the name
for the hot web of desire that
woke me from damp sheets
and dreams that hitchhike rides from
3rd eye weavers of euphoric probability.
Elsewhere, there are clean-cut cul-de-sacs
where skirted girls sit playing jax
and father still knows best. Art lives
with baited breath, in the safety
stretched to canvas, pressed by glass.
It is the tasteful language of hotel
pleasantries, one touch before the fuck
of this ghetto, my time: the street hustlers
and the sound of someone else's sleep.
***
A car idles too long
at a stoplight.
My bones are small.
I'm not supposed to be here.
Leigh Phillips is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College with the City University of New York. Her stories, memoirs, poems and criticism most recently appeared in Rhino, So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz. She is currently writing an epistolary novel in verse, generously funded by a grant from the City University of New York Research Foundation.
Return to March 2013 Edition
The sky regrets itself. By sky, I mean me.
Don't let yourself get lost
because you think someone's going to find
you. The story goes: no one's
going to find you. You're going to be on the
highway sifting Mountain Dew
bottles full of trucker crank piss and trading
them to eye‑wild tweakers
for a ticket back to tender. You are what is
tender. By you, I mean me.
The song goes: Heart. Ribcage. Envelope.
Heart. Ribcage. Envelope.
About Sleeping Women
3 AM, the time when “nothing
good happens”―stars splinter
everything; the chapel's
forgotten its God.
I want to go out there:
where a hand pumps the spray
and out comes art or 'urban decay'.
Insomniacs with tiny vacancies
for heart chambers
cruise the strip for something
with legs.
There is nothing left
but vibration―I am sidewalk fare,
where suburbia stops at midnight
when I start: this poem. That cigarette
after four months in the clean.
A handshake reaps a bag of glass
and a dollar is the currency
that unmakes the happening
of every dollar.
Nothing here is deadened in daylight,
by the sun's cruel habit
of illuminating everything―
the stoop trash is supposed to be there,
this is the new regeneration
and I'm the transfusion
of the blood, that bubbles and boils
in the streetlight hum
and the thrum of desire that builds
in breast and bursts in song.
It is when I want to walk.
When conversations converge
over Waffle House coffee
and two lanes merge on I-81.
A truck's taillights pass
through morning. It is here
I remember it all, the name
for the hot web of desire that
woke me from damp sheets
and dreams that hitchhike rides from
3rd eye weavers of euphoric probability.
Elsewhere, there are clean-cut cul-de-sacs
where skirted girls sit playing jax
and father still knows best. Art lives
with baited breath, in the safety
stretched to canvas, pressed by glass.
It is the tasteful language of hotel
pleasantries, one touch before the fuck
of this ghetto, my time: the street hustlers
and the sound of someone else's sleep.
***
A car idles too long
at a stoplight.
My bones are small.
I'm not supposed to be here.
Leigh Phillips is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College with the City University of New York. Her stories, memoirs, poems and criticism most recently appeared in Rhino, So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz. She is currently writing an epistolary novel in verse, generously funded by a grant from the City University of New York Research Foundation.
Return to March 2013 Edition