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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