A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips’ chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips has two poems nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. and is a finalist in the 2024 Eyelands Book Competition, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry contest.

Elemental Energy

Do you often wonder whether
you are out of your element,
buzzing round importantly and yet

like a stray electron
without reins or bonds
or a place that is your own?

And do you wonder,
does this make you dangerous, rogue
in the curious world of people

daring to approach?
In an old study of public librarians
assigned to brush –or not– a hand

of every visitor being handed back their books
then at the door,
asked how is your day?

Those touched
said they were happier, having a better day.
Likely, too, went out

inclined to hear wren-songs
through the traffic din
and notice the confident side-look

of the child up at the dad
holding his hand, standing
at the crosswalk. Signs of love everywhere.

Know this: your element is weightless,
exciting as car window air blast
when you were six, sticking your head out.

Here and now, your charge
is just the thing all those strangers
don’t yet know that they are hungry for.

Tree of Red Dresses

Tree of red dresses
belled by wind.
Kisses unrequested

lust wrests from presses
into felled ground,
shoveled sand.

All song expresses
circle left rind
of torn faces

the hits the misses,
the disappeared unfound
girls tear-trailed.

Cursory world dis-
interested moving, on police
shifting down its failed

roads. Breeze blesses
these red-soaked sleeves, this surplice
vested Pentecost cottonwood,

last known addresses
these prayers tied
strung, still tying

for the gone, the lost
loved, the dead
the still dying.

Light Speed

Most Fifth Avenue murderers don’t ask for permission
or wait for applause. Most don’t boast.
More wounds are inept than malicious,
I suspect, mortal but not in the way of war —
like those we inflict when we are fleshly, gouged, and desolate ourselves.

You will understand because you, too, have, sometime, loved
a partner all approach and no proximity
back before you read the fine-print advice
at the foot of your IRA spreadsheets:
“investments and securities carry the risk of loss.”

How hungry we are for
love that moves forward on the shoulders of time,
sound and safe as houses,
living in this place of crimsoned claws,
and jackal hours turning on one another.

It is just possible to glimpse grace slipping
between strangers, its shy light barely in sight,
but summoning, no matter all this malevolence
coming at us at the speed of dark.