Origination
Philip Schaefer
I coil bees into the air with my pupils. My back
plucked purple like a ukulele, taut, summer
storm bruise. Whenever I name the sun I name
its birthmark. I recite a joke I’ve never heard and sob.
Pique Noir
Philip Schaefer
It’s January in June again which means I can’t
decide what’s more depressing: the incessant radio
ads telling me depression is real or the shark
bones ribboning up the nameless beaches
of my brain. Everyone’s spending a buck to lose
or make a couple more and I am so bored
with transactions. Let’s talk about the hens
in France that hold out for certain grapes, claw
each others’ throats for small globes of blue juice.
Or how an octopus can not only taste with its eyelids
but has cells that wallpaper the back of this magnificent
eye hiding in the layers of its ever-changing skin.
What do you see? Who would you hurt more or less
depending on the weather of water? What’s that joke
about a ballroom full of presidents imagining each other
in underwear to ease the tension? Language dicks
us all around. There has to be a live microphone
between all these layers of quiet genocide.
In my heart, which is a plastic dinosaur floating
in a bathtub in Kansas, the challenge isn’t so much
whether or not god saves, but if so, will you ever see
your old friends again and if so would you want to.
Mike, I don’t believe in happenstance but I long to
see you behind the final curtain. Steady your wand.
Dear Jamie
Philip Schaefer
Cross out your name and read: Satan’s pink
uzi / missing broach / last can of tomatoes
to throw at the neighbor’s calico. Does it
make you feel more patient, this picnic
for one in the roof of your mouth? Ring
the tongue bell, roll your lovers down
the red carpet of your throat. I’m getting
all February this January which means
the future owes us both. You’re sleepwalking
somewhere in Montana, Missouri right now
because there must be a town for us
to hawk with last fall’s cherries. A crown
of corn to wear upon this plastic cross
we call weather. Jamie, you’re growing young
and inscrutable. Your blue tie belongs
to the Navy’s underwater closet. Some day
let’s pretend we are more than good
and miserable. Let’s buy the farm
and Cessna the cesura sky. Sure as shit
let’s kick the spit off our shoes and give the night
a new shiner. I’ve got my dog in a headlock
and the whole stratosphere is on fire.
What are you waiting for, old chap?
Put on your gothic spurs and spin the lamp
like you mean it. Cradle its hair, stroke the back
of its brass neck. Call it my name, please, just once.
about the writer
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He’s about to open a mezcal & tequila bar in Missoula, MT.