Empty Clip

Emilia Phillips

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781629220994
• eBook ISBN: 9781629221014
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems of Empty Clip bore into the cultures of violence in the United States while candidly cross-firing upon the poets' complicity and testifying on these cultures' effects upon female body image and mental health. From a meditation about a bullet hole-animated PowerPoint presentation on campus shooters to the startled invective against an unprovoked dick pic, lyrics brooding upon illness-driven suicidal thoughts to narratives about a slippery memory of childhood abuse, Emilia Phillips's third poetry collection sears with the "angry love" of self, in order to find some truth that's nevertheless "a broken bone that can't be set."

HOLLOW POINT

TO THE NEIGHBOR BOY WITH HIS
FATHER’S HUNTING RIFLE,
BEGGING THE POLICE TO SHOOT

Your name is an empty clip

the local news wants to load

with rumors of substance

abuse. Disturbed, next

door says over the fence as he pushes

his mower into the shed

after the borough’s door-

to-door order to stay

in. The streets went dark first

with SWAT, their helmets sun-

glossed to mirror. They looked

bored this far down, kicking dirt

& wiping palm sweat

on the Kevlar over

their hearts. Later, something else

rolled in—not dark

exactly. It was still

afternoon, & I walked

out on my porch but wasn’t

turned back. I heard you, faint

& guttered to nonsense

by the hot wind,

but I couldn’t see you. Blocked

by vans, I watched instead

the tree in your parents’ yard

sway, turning out its leaves

like wrists, the air a-hiss

with radios, & still

no black clouds.

No dark rain.

HOLLOW POINT

I found my shoe print

in blood once—

after I walked in

on the murder

scene of my dog,

my stepfather in the bathroom

cleaning his gun.

I knew something of mercy then

and how it can be unjust,

the way the dog’s head opened

like laughter

into grief, the hollow points

screaming skull and brain

into the dining room wall.

Afterwards, he gathered the dog’s shadow

in black garbage bag

and stuffed into the trunk to heave

into the church

dumpster. For a moment, I

was only animal,

not because of any excess

projected point blank into me,

but because I’m almost always

animal anyway. See, I nearly broke

the nurse’s hand years later

when she held me down

for the radiologist to inject

radioactive contrast eight times along

my cheekbone and jaw, its heat

angry as brakes on a train—

hurt her because I was being hurt,

hurt her because

hurting was a way for me

to forget or forgive

my angry love.

BEFORE HOTEL SECURITY GOT THERE

From the half-lidded reverie of whiskey I’d masked

as sleep, the sound of body on body on headboard

on a wall came to me first as fucking, illicit, her moan

pleasure—so then I might have touched myself,

as I sometimes do when I can’t quite wake and I can’t quite

sleep, before I remembered my friend in the second

queen. But who doesn’t love the unrequitedness

of the self, its question answered with a question? Our Newark

non-smoking room rising then out of timelessness

into time as the TV’s blue wraith hop-skip-jumped

brainwaves into a circadian dawn as a lamp/vase/champagne

flute burst into a kind of song and the lovers became

sudden hulks brawling, rendered concrete by the weight

they threw against the wall.

OVERPASS

Not high enough for suicide

or low for easy landing, save for

the cinematic timing of a feline

leap onto the back of a passing

semi. Not that I’ve considered it—

but my eyes have,

and in this way I’ve sent my energies into

the possibilities,

like dogs after

the Missing

into the ravine of time. As a child, I watched

the funnel

cake-fat catfish disappear under the park’s

footbridge

and reappear on the other side, as the twin

barracudas of headlights current

now into the black

expressway like nostalgia. I’m ready to say

that whatever

holds

our attention is a brief

god, that Americans have many, that lovers can be glorified;

that stopping with my hands

in my ratty pea coat pockets

here is reverence for my own life, even if

I measure it against its impact

on the pavement. I don’t know

any songs the wind also doesn’t. I’d sing them—

but I better get back

home. I walk buckled

brick into the neighborhood, Sunday

quiet. Framed in the windows

above the back doors are green bottles

collecting dust. Sometimes I glimpse

a silhouette & know

someone’s home. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• This is how I came to know how to
• Hollow Point
• Split Screen
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author