The places where Edmonia’s bones were fractured still hold violent reverberations. When it rains I massage the static hum out of each point of impact. There is nothing heavier than flesh that wishes to be on another axis, except perhaps stone she shaped. Tonight she tells me, it’s impossible to bring a lover to the small death she deserves. An orgasm is excavated, never given. She takes my face in her hands without permission. I take her waist with care not to treat her like a healing thing. My fear winnows. She is digging me out of my misery with her fugitive hands. No one has ever led me out of myself the way she does when we move as though the species depends on our pleasure. She makes a pocket of me until I cry. I’ve seen that field, the site of her breaking, in the empty parking lot I cut through to class. There is nothing left for us to forge in Oberlin, and still we remain, Edmonia a sentient rock, swallowing her own feet in want of motion. We fit on this twin sized bed only by entanglement. We survive here by the brine of our brutish blood.
From Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Xandria Phillips. Used with permission of Nightboat Books, nightboat.org.
The places where Edmonia’s bones were fractured still hold violent reverberations. When it rains I massage the static hum out of each point of impact. There is nothing heavier than flesh that wishes to be on another axis, except perhaps stone she shaped. Tonight she tells me, it’s impossible to bring a lover to the small death she deserves. An orgasm is excavated, never given. She takes my face in her hands without permission. I take her waist with care not to treat her like a healing thing. My fear winnows. She is digging me out of my misery with her fugitive hands. No one has ever led me out of myself the way she does when we move as though the species depends on our pleasure. She makes a pocket of me until I cry. I’ve seen that field, the site of her breaking, in the empty parking lot I cut through to class. There is nothing left for us to forge in Oberlin, and still we remain, Edmonia a sentient rock, swallowing her own feet in want of motion. We fit on this twin sized bed only by entanglement. We survive here by the brine of our brutish blood.
From Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Xandria Phillips. Used with permission of Nightboat Books, nightboat.org.
I write to you from the predicament of Blackness.
You see, I’ve been here all my life and found,
on the atomic level, it’s impossible to walk through
most doorways. I can, however, move through
walls. I write to you from the empty seat that isn’t
empty. I write to you when a feel is copped.
I write myself out of bed. I write to you as the spook
who sat by the door. I write to you from Olivia
Pope’s apolitical mouth. I am here because I could
never get the hang of body death, though it has been
presented to me like one would offer a roofied cocktail
or high-interest loan. I am only here because I started
eating again. I am only here because I am ineligible
to exist otherwise. I’m only here because I left and
returned through an Atlantic wormhole. I write to you as
the American version of me. In the American version,
Orpheus’ lyre is a gun. Eurydice thinks of doctors,
or, rather a cold hand. It feels like one is sliding its sterile
nails over the curtains of her womb. Once, a healer’s hands
passed through my flesh, and I went on trial for stealing
ten fingers. When my spoon scrapes the bottom of a bowl
it sounds like a choir of siblings naming stars after their favorite
meals. Physicists are classifying new matters and energies
every day. Dark matter, Black flesh are in high demand,
and we never see a penny. I urge you. If you see a sister
walk through walls or survive the un-survivable, sip your
drink and learn to forget or love the taxed apparition before you.
From Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Xan Phillips. Used with permission of Nightboat Books, nightboat.org.