poems: Leigh Phillips

Dear History,
For Howard Zinn

I have tried to reinvent you, as I insert a song into the mouths of every breathless-beating
war-drum in the chests of time and now–

History, I have held the beautiful bodies of insurrection. I have held hymns heavy as sins and sang light as water and flour. Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis between my teeth and tongue, spitting sonorous couplets of black and white women’s liberation, spinning records into the 90s, hip-hop stepping heels into the groove of each year, collapsing on crescendo of its–

History, I have seen your televisions ripe with Bill Clinton’s saxophone, can’t stop, won’t stop, Fleetwood’s don’t stop thinking about…I see Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America echoing Reaganomics throughout the halls of every orphanage of sense and sex…tomorrow–

History, I’ve watched the fade of bodies in blankets, bleeding under the aim of eyes that see but cannot feel the burn of KS lesions, the lungs swimming in the deep end of pneumonia, the government gone and dykes pushing wheelchairs of their broken brothers–

History, I have seen you fire heat into the heart of Amadou Bailo Diallo, how often you leave black breathless, how cancers leave us breastless–

How protest fists become bound behind backs as we ride in the back of cop cars with our social security numbers written up and down the legs [088-] just in case [088-] just in case [088-] history writes “I love you” on our limbs we hope stay whole through teargas–

History, we are the beautiful brown bodies of insurrection

History, you are not listening

History, I say we are the beautiful brown bodies of insurrection

Is anybody listening?

And you want to close your hospitals and your churches, to send your orphans elsewhere

History wants us to love without loving

History wants prayer without strips of light cascading down two hands that touch two parted thighs of Castro leatherdaddies chanting “Ohm”

History, you have a thousand tongues and prayer is everywhere. History, I french kiss you in Farsi. History, you left me naked in a torn sheet and waiting for my lover to come home until I sang there isn’t any home, there isn’t home, there isn’t any–

History.

You are the home I hold until we’re really home.

History.

I left the bathroom light on, love’s not touching. Only the moon spoons the night and we are its children, walking hallways barefoot, begging a name that’s not our own.

Shark Survivor
“The sharks never love.” -Deborah Scaling Kiley

And the heart that stops its flapping and dies right before it lands on the powerline like a cunt. Someone hit me hard on the back; I vomit a black valentine. In the human body, the abdomen is separated from the chest cavity by a muscle called “sheet between the roving seagull in my breast and landfill.” Please empty all the objects you can’t remember into my shell of a divine storage space. I don’t keep my birds in cages unless you count the ribs. My breath translates a cell block called A Very Old Leigh with the Enormous Reflux. The city throws feed at my Hiatal hernia. Pluto burns underneath the skin until the fester of a staph infection called My Bright Underworld. There, too, was a bird. I named her “the coast guard knows we’re out here.” Atlantic, I wait to be found around inlets of ashtrays. I rent the moment like love is that Criterion DVD I don’t even own. This girl said, I was meant to watch the alchemy of others. I raptured so hard just now I drank all the water in the sea because I thought it was a lot like blood. It was. Seven hours later, I became a Spanish dancer and every kiss played backward in the ripple of exorcism. We’re on a 13 foot zodiac raft falling further from angel. What does she see in you? I’m going to step off the edge now. I can see land up ahead. I’m going to the hospital where my mother lives. I’m going to the 7-11 for cigarettes. Leigh, stop. There’s only water out there. No there isn’t. I can see it. I’m going to do it. When the boat went down, it was the loneliest boat. I’m writing for some other reason. Not that one, that one. Dorsal fins circling a drop of menses. The diameter of lonely boats. Her, right there. She’s got her hand on the 13 foot zodiac raft. “You’re not pretty, but you have a good personality,” the woman said. The man said, “I don’t like your personality, I just think you’re hot.” She’s on top. Now she’s under. Now, from behind. The poet walked into the room. The sharks never love. Gather around, it’s story-time. The poet said, if you think you’re right, you’re right. Deborah said, the sharks never love. She’s right. She’s not right. She’s right. She’s right.

LEIGH PHILLIPS spends all of her time on the subway. She lives in Brooklyn, teaches in the Bronx for the City University of New York, and writes poems on the many stops in between. She was recently selected as winner of the Mad Hatters’ Review innovative fiction prize, and her work has appeared in So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Art, Wicked Alice, and Lodestar Quarterly, among others.