Groundspeed , livre ebook

GROUNDSPEED
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
AKRON SERIES IN POETRY
Mary Biddinger, Editor

Emilia Phillips, Groundspeed
Philip Metres, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album
Jennifer Moore, The Veronica Maneuver
Brittany Cavallaro, Girl-King
Oliver de la Paz, Post Subject: A Fable
John Repp, Fat Jersey Blues
Emilia Phillips, Signaletics
Seth Abramson, Thievery
Steve Kistulentz, Little Black Daydream
Jason Bredle, Carnival
Emily Rosko, Prop Rockery
Alison Pelegrin, Hurricane Party
Matthew Guenette, American Busboy
Joshua Harmon, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie
David Dodd Lee, Orphan, Indiana
Sarah Perrier, Nothing Fatal
Oliver de la Paz, Requiem for the Orchard
Rachel Dilworth, The Wild Rose Asylum
John Minczeski, A Letter to Serafin
John Gallaher, Map of the Folded World
Heather Derr-Smith, The Bride Minaret
William Greenway, Everywhere at Once
Brian Brodeur, Other Latitudes

Titles published since 2008.
For a complete listing of titles published in the series, go to www.uakron.edu/uapress/poetry .
GROUNDSPEED
Emilia Phillips
Copyright © 2016 by Emilia Phillips
All rights reserved • First Edition 2016 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Phillips, Emilia, author.
Title: Groundspeed : poems / Emilia Phillips.
Description: First edition. | Akron, Ohio : University of Akron Press, 2016. | Series: Akron series in poetry
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048933 (print) | LCCN 2016002686 (ebook) | ISBN 9781629220345 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781629220352 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781629220369 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781629220376 (ePUB)
Classification: LCC PS 3616.H 4553 A 6 2016 (print) | LCC PS 3616.H 4553 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048933
∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover: Groundspeed by Hollie Chastain, © 2015. Reproduced with permission. Cover design by Amy Freels.
Groundspeed was designed and typeset in Centaur with Futura display by Amy Freels and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
I
Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon’s
Life Vest Under Your Seat
Stopping at Texaco a Year After My Brother’s Death
Wheelchair in a Hayloft
Pastoral (Future Interstate)
Entente
Abstinence Lesson
The Showers
The Bright Obvious
II
YouTube: Dog Eating a Human Leg on the Ganges
Lodge
Static, Frequency
Pastoral (Oncoming)
The Episode of Cops in Which My Father Appears
The Wind Lends a Voice to the Mountain Laurel Above Pretty Polly’s Grave
All These Things Shall Be Added Unto You
Strata
Tomography
III
“ The Rising Cost of Dying ”
Pastoral (With One’s Head out the Car Window)
Phaeacia’s Orchard
Bruce Bickford at the Edge of the World
Snake Woman
Groundspeed
Paradiso
Saul Bass Redesigns the First Man
Roadside America
Cartography in Absentia
Aubade
Pastoral (Radio)
Supine Body in Full-Length Mirror, Hotel Room, Upper West Side
Notes
Acknowledgments
“ O brothers,” I said, “through a hundred thousand
perils you have reached the West
and so, during this so brief a vigil
of our senses that remain for us ,
be unwilling to deny the experience
of following the sun, the world unpeopled ….”
—Dante’s Odysseus
This car is just beginning its life. A lightning bolt couldn’t stop it .
—Hazel Motes
for Janet, and for Tracy

Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon’s
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was .
No one else with a book, the slick
weeklies gossip amongst
themselves on the side
tables as the ticker rolls the Dow
Jones down down down under
a profile of the marathon
bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove
argues for the removal of a race
of peoples that do not please
him: What is past
remedy calls for the surgeon’s
knife . He will take a hunk of my
cheek (cancer) and though I can’t
see mid-procedure, I imagine
the site as an apricot, bitten.
This, a survival mechanism—
romanticism. David says,
If you’re out
in public and you don’t want anyone
to talk to you, bring a book
of poetry . Even as I enter the confidence
of the room, I avoid my
reflection in the window, for there,
most of all, I see myself as only I can,
as only the eye will have me—
as light, as light alone.
Life Vest Under Your Seat
At some indeterminate coordinate over the Atlantic,
the body sloughs hours like snakeskin, like one moral vestment
after another. An international flight is the closest
we’ll ever know of limbo, from the Latin limbus meaning
hem or border. My email asks, Did you mean to attach
files? with the SEND-click of my response to my father’s
photos: dust-colored mountains rostrumed on the walls
and metal buildings of Bagram. The in-flight entertainment system
has two flight cams: one from the nose, another from the tail.
The idea is, those of us who are comforted by knowledge
will feel safer seeing our vessel and where it’s headed.
At night, only a regular tremor of wing lights. Nothing
else, but the dark variegated by clouds and lens dirt.
In Virginia where I live, our blond, zealot governor signed the bill
requiring an ultrasound before an abortion. My mother says
she’s living only for grandbabies . But I’m living before then.
I am cold, and the blankets onboard are thin. A home
inventor in Massachusetts killed a young mother with his Shop-Vac
rigged for lipo. The hose snuffled up fat from her thighs
like cotton from a wet pillow. Is an accident always a purpose
of incorrect means? We need a control for these variables.
Let’s say we know each other’s pain and can sing along
with it like an old song. Let’s say there’s only one pain
performance but different seats in the auditorium.
On the set of The Holy Grail, Graham Chapman looked skyward
at a passing plane and said, Think of all the gin and tonics
they’re having . This is how the other Pythons finally knew
he was a drunk. My mother got me sloshed
to teach me how to drink. Every time I fly now, I take half
a blue pill an hour before boarding. We have our hang ups,
our let downs, turbulence that rocks us to sleep. In case of a loss
in cabin pressure, overhead masks will drop, says the recording.
You’ve heard this before but not this: Claes Oldenburg used clippings
of legs from ladies’ stocking ads for a study toward a giant
leather sculpture of shoestring potatoes falling from a sack.