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Having a Fight With You

Patrick Phillips

is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV.

It’s like waking with scalpels
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.

Having a fight with you
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper
that says you never loved me—

my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.

Patrick Phillips was born in 1970 in Atlanta and raised in the Appalachian foothills of north Georgia. He attended Tufts University, and earned an MFA in Poetry at the University of Maryland, as well as a PhD in English Literature at New York University.

About Patrick Phillips

Themes

About this Poem

“‘Having a Fight with You’ is my riff on Frank O’Hara’s famous poem ‘Having a Coke with You,’ and shares with it the subject of love’s intoxicating, sometimes all-consuming power over us. O’Hara wrote one of the great odes to smitten-ness, and I hope mine is at least a variation on that theme—though I dwell instead on the gut-punch when two lovers quarrel. I was trying to be honest about those moments when love, precisely because of its intensity, feels a lot like devastation.”
—Patrick Phillips

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More by this poet

Galleria Ode

Something there is that doesn’t love the mall
where we used to chainsmoke on the mezzanine

and watch the escalator’s endless crawl
up from Häagen-Dazs to Chuck E. Cheese—

something so embarrassed by it all, it shatters glass
and scatters yellow lading slips among the weeds,

Patrick Phillips

2023

Falling

The truth is that I fall in love
so easily because

it's easy.
It happens

a dozen times some days.
I've lived whole lives,

had children,
grown old, and died

in the arms of other women
in no more time

Patrick Phillips

2016

Sunset Park

The Chinese truck driver
throws the rope
like a lasso, with a practiced flick,

over the load:
where it hovers an instant,
then arcs like a willow

into the waiting,
gloved hand
of his brother.

What does it matter
that, sitting in traffic,
I glanced out the window

and found them that way?
So lean and sleek-muscled
in their sweat-stiffened t-shirts:

offloading the pallets
just so they can load up
again in the morning,

and so on,
and so forth
forever like that—

Patrick Phillips

2015

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Having a Fight With You

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