Sometimes it's
bigger than my
body, the body

that gave it
life, that is
its life-as if I'm

a frame for
it, as if it
continues beyond

my end, although no
one, not here,
can see where

it goes, how
far, & now
it finds

its way into
every possible
place I

imagine, even
the past, which believes
in my scar like

a prophecy, & like a god's
work, I have no
memory of it breathing

into me &
abstracting me
to myth from which to

remake the world
into the rising
& falling

action of fiction-my body
as denouement. Sometimes I feel
it without waiting

for its hum on
the nerves, its shivering
arc from eye

to jawbone. How often
I want to
give it a voice so

it can tell
me what I want
it to say-that it knows

me like tomorrow
does. That a need lives
in lack's because.




About this poem
"I initially drafted this poem on a poster board instead of standard-size paper and found that the format insisted that I write about things that seem much larger than they are, that expand beyond their physical limits, like the scar that extends between my eye and jawline on my right cheek. Strangers and friends alike have suggested that I give it a new origin narrative: I was in a knife/sword fight; I smashed my head through a glass window, etc. In that way, it seems to have a life-imagined or not-beyond my own."
-Emilia Phillips

About Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips is the author of "Groundspeed" (University of Akron Press, 2016). She teaches at Centenary College and lives near Hackettstown, N.J.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Emilia Phillips. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate