Issue 15 • Fall 2005 • Poetry

A is for Beauty, Convulsive

Leigh Phillips

A is for Beauty, Convulsive

Learning how to spell, I was
four and never knew you'd exist.

I penned the letters of my name,
soon after I learned the akimbo-
slope-akimbo arc of A, and one
day, link of letter to letter as
love to verse:

B is for Boy.
C is for Cannot.

A.

This is the end of my longing's line
except for when you're gone, I'm left

to trace your single syllable's spine
in the lyric time
between    your     lips,
my vowels,   to   breath   I   bend
to   pen   in   prayer

I still haven't slept
in your arms i want

to build a home
in your hold and let
the light on,

wrapping. The setting sun
burning waters to sleep.

I was four and spelling
L-E-E
which rhymes with Be
Alone in This
sentence that precedes "I am"
until
an indefinite article
alters
as "used before nouns and noun phrases that denote a single but unspecified"
A
little scripting,
to unscript,
thus re-inscribe the seeking
sentence
starts with A and
ends with We: our mantra, my forgiven name.

Leigh Phillips is working towards her PhD at Binghamton University, focusing her energies on contemporary feminisms, political discourses, and experimental poetics. Her poems have appeared in Hollins Album; Harpur Palate; Long Shot; and Ugly Poets, Beautiful Poems: An Anthology of Fusion. She is circulating her first poetry manuscript, Naked in the Heartbreak House. Leigh also has articles expected to appear in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism, published by Greenwood Press and edited by Leslie Heywood.

Go To: Issue 15 or Lodestar Quarterly home page