Emilia Phillips

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. To make, you first have to create materials. Re: man , we know the rib removed. But,before— ? Forget ash to ash, dust & c. Stick a floating rib (i.e. thoracic 11–12, y’know — “Edenic”) in a glass of  water with the promise it’ll grow roots like leek or fur like chia. The joke’s Crusoe astride the bone or   Jim & Huck paddling rustic as a ballpoint pen will go. —Nn- o. (That’s not a plank

I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. No one else with a book, the slick weeklies gossip amongst themselves on the side tables as the ticker rolls the Dow Jones down down down under a profile of the marathon bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove argues for the removal of a race of   peoples that do not please him:What is past remedy calls for the surgeon’s knife

My story’s told in the mis-dial’s hesitance & anonyms of crank calls, in the wires’ electric elegy & glass expanded by the moth flicker of filament. I call a past that believes I’m dead. On the concrete here, you can see where I stood in rust, lashed to the grid. On the corner of Pine & Idlewood, I’ve seen a virgin on her knees before the angel of a streetlight & Moses stealing the Times to build a fire. I’ve seen the city fly right through a memory & not break its neck. But the street still needs a shrine, so return my ringing heart & no one to answer it, a traveler whose only destination is waywardness. Forgive us our apologies, the bees in our bells, the receiver’s grease, days horizoned into words. If we stand monument to anything, it’s that only some voices belong to men.