Emilia Phillips: FABLE: [That horse is in such fine fettle his spine lies]
(Vulcana, strongwoman, to Atlas, strongman)
So relaxes one muscle as another contracts—
For mettlewe slogged the road out
as we walked it. Two men
I can lift at once & like ragdolls bung them! For laughs,
Inamorato,
I’ll knot their beards. You hold
two leaden globes: One where I am
Sister; the other, Mistress—
I raise our youngest to suckle, & it is
hallowed. Like us,
the gods must have known, though
immense
in their love, they could hurl themselves
from the earth—
enburdened as they were having no
weight at all.
EMILIA PHILLIPS is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, forthcoming 2013), editor’s choice for the Akron Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks Strange Meeting (Eureka Press, 2010) and Bestiary of Gall (Sundress Publications, 2013). She is the associate literary editor of Blackbird and the recipient of the Mérida Fellowship from U.S. Poets in Mexico, the Poetry Prize fromThe Journal, and a Zoland Poetry Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. Her poems appear in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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