Sunsets and Silencers

Memento Mori 

They say I’m dangerous, but my chest is full of blackbirds. When the 21 guns go off, the cloud of wings scatter over the flat plains of your body. My grandfather’s purple heart beats on my nightstand. It taught me the two-step of metronomes. All the old fishermen sunk their hooks into my heart. I’m going down. Morning wraps its thick lips around the girth of grace. My hips follow into yours, motion grinds its song. Mourning has its grace. Slow dance, my grace. My morning, out of time. My hips are open in the morning, gentle as vapor. See, I’ve found out how to boil. One time I had this slant of sunlight, and in it, I found a few certain pages. The poem goes “arm, elbow, wrist.” The poem goes “reach.” I cut my tributaries off at the stream. I know how to commit to forgetting. I french kiss the shores of Normandy. I’m engaged to asphalt in Vermont, Massachusetts, even Iowa. I’ve inherited a heart that beats the royal we. Grandfather was shot in the knee. He tells me this when it rains sometimes. I hold rainwater in my backside. Where I live right now, everything curves. A half note bent in two, pressed between speakers of stereo. No one has asked about the end of my body. Beauty was this thing we locked in early twenties. I’m going to start collecting orchids now. Some say, will you? I say, the frenzy of birds. See how they all leave the tree at once. 

I’m Picking Up on the Spirit of a Little Girl 

A megaphone full of bees swarm the violent tongues of sex. My Electronic Voice Phenomenon says, keep waking until the walking stops. Every day I find a new way to pray, though I never close my eyes in sleep. I talk to my mother like she’s in the room now. I say, meet me in a Catholic place where the water makes new limbs. Mine ache so I think I might have been amputated in a future life. Everything’s a phantom. With night vision goggles, you can still see the handprint of my ex trailing down my backside. I press my pen into the table and the Jehovah's Witness on the corner screams. All the letters she ever wrote are in a landfill, spawning nests for sparrows. Swallows hoop my skirt of sleep. I don’t know what that means, but I can tell you about the electricity here. Electromagnetic frequencies and the voices time records. If I push my finger down this wall and taste it, I’m tasting you. I forgot to mention the waves. It all comes in waves. I am thirty and my face looks like Aunt Helen. In the photograph, her face collapses into the lips I wear to sing. I crawl naked across the carpeted floor, grade a paper, call that spring. Don’t let me forget the waves. There was this headache blowing a tumbleweed through a silent apartment. I was not alone. I was not alone. Because mother always said, be happy. She started as a fox. She stopped at the end of song. Girl asks, are you complete now. Girl says, I’m Pluto with 3 known moons. There, a revolution starts with death, begins with song, with sex. I just wanted to pass through a wall one day and tell you. Is anybody with me? It’s cold in here. At least, I think so. Don’t you? 
 
Poesis 

There is this firedoor between myself and losing her. On the other side, I can see a beautiful fool, letting a man grind into me. Fucking is forgetting here. I am not there, but I am wildly, awkwardly here. Ask me about the impossible. I will tell you about how I fell out of a tree in spring. Every branch draped me until my limp body sang unconscious across the limbs. Light saved me. We dilate. Even the moon sweats me into you. Every conversation sways its broken couplets. When you move your sentence forward, I echo in the sound that bird bones make when they shift on a powerline. Listen hard. I am talking about dancing, but we never dance. We are writing ourselves through a pinhole camera. Every angle, rich with the grains of shapelessness breathed. I am chipping at my breath now. I want to show you how it’s possible to live. Sunday kisses the inside of each wrist, says, “I’m glad you made it.” There is this ripple. Keturah wrote a rain as lovely as her name. I have no tattoos because it’s impossible to forget like this. Everything is under skin, the most permanent you you’ll ever know. In me, there is this shell of girls: one is falling through the tree. One fell out of time. One is dipping the last carnation into the earth. The last, crying in art history because she is a new sky. Didn't you know? New skies bend the obvious over the side of sleep. Bend me over, I’m getting off. Are you waking? I want to start walking to a certain lake with a name like a poem learns rain. Cows have one stomach with four compartments. I have four chambers, in each the old and new blood of me contracts. Michele says, “it is so full of history. There is sadness. There is happiness. There is art.” I want to visit Havana someday, too. I am falling down a tree. Are you? I don’t want to fall into you like an accident. You are not an accident, I wrote. A garden. I am lonely for a garden. A child sits with his mother. The flowers, he murmurs. The flowers. 
 
 

A System of Correspondences 

Yesterday flowers so fast the spring opens itself like an odalisque. The green plains of body collapse on body, in nude we green. Yesterday flowers. So fast the color oceans, I ocean myself. Flowers fell past. Tomorrow, pouring into. Tomorrow you'll flicker so fast. Tonight I'll fall through the family tree and into the bedrock, bones written for sleep. Tonight I'll turn the light off and tree a name, branch its syllables onto my pillowcase. No one is naming the name. I'm actually tracing subway directions to the corner of "Somewhere She Is Standing" and "Not Enough Light." I remember how to be alone more than I remember you. It is possible to forget how to be a slut, and even whimper while you're doing it. Remember the firedoor between my skin and organs? Me neither. It burned in the fire. I imagine my next so full of nostalgia, like cement in knots for trees, hardening around a heart and arrow. I will so be there, once I stop choking on this peach pit. Here, I am telling you about my city in the bedroom night. The expressway to my God. Here, I write my mother dead letters in the air, postmarked by careful mediums. They tell her what I had for breakfast, how I put all the blue flowers to my lips. I believe in softness. Like this. Liquids today. I tell her how to whole my hard. For hold. How haiku held. Old. I try to make a poem that is cold, silvering within a white heat. Shivering in the road steam. She says, you really know how to love, love. You follow through the through. And she writes, "I miss you so much my skin is cracking" and I write, "panim d'fanim: face in face." Dear mother, blue eye to my brown: she passes me in and out. The diaphanous talespin of the candle, running its tongue along a dark spine. 
 
 
 

Resonance and Ring 

"Resonance," she reaches. "Ring," my hand to her. "You are the ripple of water in stone." "The cool wet underside of stone, your palms." "Stone, you in my water." Who verbs the angel. "Look to my clouds and count your face." "Sheen of a face on the eye, iris mirror." Hand flat to hand. Iris, my mirror. "Iris, my mentor." Arrive at my chest: "I pass this language through." I bend to wind. You follow. We wisp, twist air around our fingers set to the frequency of hair slipping south on a pillow they can't hear: you and you, the we of you, the "only" to the "connect" you we. "Meet me in a place where edges grind soft." Breath. "We'll take the hours, put to tongue." Beat. "The edges of things, drift a house." Bone. "The warm basin of my breast set to rise." Breathe. Where the plaster comes down with a kiss and dust in an eyelash is battered by risk: we are back to two stones, one water, concentric circles summer the shimmer around bore, wading legs dragged to deep, "you will find me one inch beneath your finger kiss to surface lake." Oh: look at my lying here, I am under here. You look like conversation set to fire. Under here, the lights, the lights. Come: my eyes have never been so clear. Look at my face it has never been more what you wanted, translucent, the light of fish. Flush my face and it opens to you in a word. Sunlight pours my eyes come to touch. "This flower is a door." Look at my face, the light of fish. "Everyone opening in your hands.” The word. You angel. "I've got the light my stomach collects, petals in your backside." I may be beautiful here in the way of you.

Leigh Phillips’ work has appeared in Squid Quaterly, Connecticut River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Fringe, and Vox, among others