Michelle Bitting: FOR PHIL • Cleaver Magazine

Michelle Bitting
FOR PHIL

All day we’ve bent
like Benedictine monks

over armoires and bookshelves,
rubbing the house clean

of grime and wicked thick
dust, pausing but once

to drop our robes and oil
each other bright as snakes

entwined in the grass
of our sun-bolted bed.

You never left me
or the strange world of my childhood

I carry like a mourner
on my back, never quite able

to set the black box down
and leave it behind

without turning back
to turn it around.

Three decades I’ve waited
to jump the suicide train

my family tracks like a runaway
beneath coastal starlight,

a southern cross
I note and bind in books

stretched from ghost smoke
like a cigarette

I wish I had
but I’m trying not to do that

because I like my body
when it’s with your body—
two strands of the same
high-voltage cable

holding me damp and sparking
day or night against

the green skin of the dark.

~ after Joseph Millar & e e cummings

Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections: Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at the University of Arizona Global.