Having a Fight With You
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.
Copyright © 2022 by Patrick Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘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
Patrick Phillips
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.