This is not an age of beauty,
I say to the Rite-Aid as I pass a knee-high plastic witch
whose speaker-box laugh is tripped by my calf
breaking the invisible line cast by her motion
sensor. My heart believes it is a muscle

of love, so how do I tell it it is a muscle of blood?

This morning, I found myself
awake before my alarm & felt I'd been betrayed

by someone. My sleep is as thin as a paper bill
backed by black bars of coal that iridesce
indigo in the federal reserve of

dreams. Look, I said to the horse's
head I saw severed & then set on the ground, the soft
tissue of the cheek & crown cleaved with a necropsy
knife until the skull was visible. You look more
horse than the horses

with names & quilted coats in the pasture, grazing unbothered

by your body in pieces, steaming

against the drizzle. You once had a name
that filled your ears like amphitheaters,
that caused an electrical

spark to bead to your brain. My grief was born
in the wrong time, my grief an old soul, grief re-
incarnate. My grief, once a black-winged

beetle. How I find every excuse to indulge it, like a child
given quarters. In the restaurant, eating alone,

instead of interrogating my own
solitude, I'm nearly undone by the old
woman on her own. The window so filthy,

it won't even reflect her face, which must not be the same
face she sees when she dreams

of herself in the third person.


About This Poem
"I wrote this poem by speaking it aloud over and over until I remembered it on a drive from Pittsburgh back to New Jersey. I have long interrogated the America one can see along the highways-its extremes manifesting in billboards, bumper stickers and political campaign signs-and that America always lonelies me."
-Emilia Phillips

About Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips is the author of "Groundspeed" (University of Akron Press, 2016). She teaches at Centenary University and lives in northwestern New Jersey.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2017 Emilia Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate