My Childhood Dog Jessie Once Ate A Box of 120-Count Crayolas and Shat Speckled Rainbows for a Week
I used to think everything had meaning— and it does.
—Mary Ruefle
And how was I supposed to
not look for her
leavings like Easter
eggs or mud
pies with sprinkles
in the tall summer
grass? My humor back
then—fast
to ignite, like Vicky
Volvo’s backseat
upholstery
when my mother’s
cigarette
wind-whipped
out her open
window and back in
through mine.
The little burn
on my thigh
like a tiny camellia,
the blister’s
petals angry
as the lie.
Don’t show this
to anyone, she said.
They’ll think—
they’ll think I—
I butterflied
my heart
like a shrimp
over that. And
when I asked
if I could call
my grandmother
about the rainbow
shit, mom said, Some things
we just don’t
talk about.
I didn’t understand
delight
not shared.
Or pain.
Soon, the blister
melted back
into me.
Like joy.
My forgetting—
human, plain.
At Eleven, I Described an Aging, Female Celebrity to My Father as Looking "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet"
I thought I was talking about horses.
I mean, I thought my mother had been
talking about horses. The way they sweat
when you ride them hard—that oily sheen
on their coats like curing cast iron.
I wanted a horse so bad I checked out
the newspaper during library time,
copying the classifieds onto the back
of my hand: Gelding, 11yo, 15.5 hands.
On Sundays, his day
of custody, my father sometimes took me
to a nearby farm to ride
and there, on the back
of Ariel or Carlos or Nan,
I’d imagine myself on my future
ranch with my husband Brian
Oakes, the boy who sat two rows
away and whose father taught us
how to balance a checkbook
during one Junior Achievement
lesson. When I said what I said,
my father threatened soap.
And then he threatened
my mother. He said, Parrot,
into the phone. He said, Just like.
I was also fat. And Brian knew it.
My father knew it and said,
More exercise or else—
I did Jump Rope for Heart.
The Presidential Fitness Test.
My Republican father, a “McCain man,”
did a Bill Clinton impersonation
as we drove the twelve hours
to Florida: I did not
have sexual relations
with that woman. I heard
she was fat. I heard, Out
of all the women,
from women. My mother
included. And me, then.
I’m sorry, Monica.
I’m sorry, Joan Jett—
I thought I was talking
about horses.
I thought beauty ran wild
somewhere else.
EMILIA PHILLIPS (she/her/hers) is the author of four poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including the forthcoming Embouchure (2021), and four chapbooks. Winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2019-2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship, Phillips’s poems, lyric essays, and book reviews appear widely in literary publications including Agni, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, Publisher’s Weekly, and elsewhere. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro.