Age of Beauty by Emilia Phillips

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 3, 2017   Age of Beauty   Emilia Phillips

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.            Copyright © 2017 Emilia Phillips. Used with permission of the author. 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   Emilia Phillips is the author of Groundspeed (University of Akron Press, 2016). She teaches at Centenary University and lives in northwestern New Jersey.   Photo credit: Tracy Tanner   Poetry by Phillips   Groundspeed (University of Akron Press, 2016) "For the Twentieth Century" by Frank Bidart "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" by Jack Spicer "Leaves" by Lloyd Schwartz Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038