Poetry / Xandria Phillips
:: Sativa Song ::
for Brannon Rockwell-Charland
it’s me, bitch
bud not being
and loud as hell
when I move
you move
like a whale
and the fire
savaging its belly
the spark lifting
the locust off
its haunches
that’s what I be
dark as detritus
covered in rainbow
street toxin
and oil slick
I’m so woke
I ain’t never sleep
and I don’t need
a hook
for this shit
I’ve got too many
thoughts to share
on the continuity
of this sitcom
played in most cases
for its high-fructose
background jeers
I’ve got thoughts
on Congress
wood grains
and quicksand
that I want to plant
in your kneecaps
I’m digging a well
with a shovel made
from your hunger
to house the swell
where blood inflates
with pulse
crosses
in grids of pleasure
I snap the reigns
on your temples
it’s time to go
I have this boat
it’s so lovely
and mystic and
just everything
you’d want
in a vessel
and blessed as
the elevated
the boat always
leaks and sinks
and strands us
somewhere
too blue to re-access
with memory
once we’ve left
:: Two-Headed Slake ::
You take the tongue I speak and make me beg it back into my head. Without language, I’m a man stranded and walking barefoot. No nuance. A goat bleating its way home in the dark. I labor sound, a braying siren sans time signature. You lather your hands post-theft, and I translate beasted litany: They’re building a podium to disclose my animalia from. Wooing valleys where my names lived, waxed, and fermented their sigil into the sunken earth. In me they built you a home with a porch swing out back. You colonist, carry me over my threshold. Run up the stairs and run back down. Be thorough. Before the windows distill to fog-licked pelt, turn on every single light in this good damned house.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These forms speak to the parts of myself that need to nest and arrange in order to make sense of environments. Tedious expeditions, more beleaguered than loved by craft, these poems are small, formerly uncharted artifacts about myself. I am someone who wrote from within academic institutions for many formative years. Living outside academia, I now see the ways I was pressured by internal and external variables to be contrary or at constant odds with subjects in my work. At its marrow my poetry existed to disavow because my relevance was constantly questioned. These poems speak to a recentering of value: the risk that I court every time I open the door. I am curious about my stakes in love and pleasure, and how the outside world can so swiftly intrude upon intimacy. I have much to learn from being perceptive about what thrives uninvited at my interior.
Xandria Phillips is a poet based in Chicago. She is the author of Hull (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Find her work online at The Offing, The Journal, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, Scalawag, and The Shallow Ends. For more, visit xandriaphillips.com.