On Receipt of a Dick Pic
by Emilia Phillips
We wanted arrival to be instant
because we didn’t want to be separate
from what we loved.
—Dana Levin
My imagination is generous, but my resolution is not
I wanted to say. Become an unknown number, a crank
call before this fragment diminished in the cis-binary
of phallic ones, vaginal zeros. All bodies are anachronisms,
always dragging the club feet of their conceptions into future
after future after future immured in now. I wish we could say
we are making ourselves eternal by making ourselves
forwardable, an afterlife in the cloud, how like the Assunta
the Singularity, which always seemed like some Oedipal paraphilia.
But you have made your tongue into the letter p, your eyes
into a colon. I have always wanted to name a cock
“Pun,” a word derived from the Italians’ raunchy-noised
punctilio (its fuck-sound in the compound consonant
entering a slippery el), but all it means: a fine or petty point
of conduct or procedure. We will never forgive one another
for being human, which is a part of what makes us
human. I opened the image in the sun so bright
I had to shade the screen from what reductions of me
instinct makes. My nude, my spam, my beloved, Titian was
called “The Sun Amidst Small Stars.” But how does one love
what’s made of light and so far away?
because we didn’t want to be separate
from what we loved.
—Dana Levin
My imagination is generous, but my resolution is not
I wanted to say. Become an unknown number, a crank
call before this fragment diminished in the cis-binary
of phallic ones, vaginal zeros. All bodies are anachronisms,
always dragging the club feet of their conceptions into future
after future after future immured in now. I wish we could say
we are making ourselves eternal by making ourselves
forwardable, an afterlife in the cloud, how like the Assunta
the Singularity, which always seemed like some Oedipal paraphilia.
But you have made your tongue into the letter p, your eyes
into a colon. I have always wanted to name a cock
“Pun,” a word derived from the Italians’ raunchy-noised
punctilio (its fuck-sound in the compound consonant
entering a slippery el), but all it means: a fine or petty point
of conduct or procedure. We will never forgive one another
for being human, which is a part of what makes us
human. I opened the image in the sun so bright
I had to shade the screen from what reductions of me
instinct makes. My nude, my spam, my beloved, Titian was
called “The Sun Amidst Small Stars.” But how does one love
what’s made of light and so far away?
Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Groundspeed (2016) and Signaletics (2013), as well as three chapbooks. Her poetry and lyric essays appear in the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, Agni, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Nonfiction Prize from StoryQuarterly, the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary University of New Jersey and the found of OFFSET: A Poetry Broadside Digitization Project.