Having a Fight With You

is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV.
 

It’s like waking with scalpels 
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.
 

Having a fight with you 
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper 
that says you never loved me—

my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.

Copyright © 2022 by Patrick Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Having a Fight with You’ is my riff on Frank O’Hara’s famous poem ‘Having a Coke with You,’ and shares with it the subject of love’s intoxicating, sometimes all-consuming power over us. O’Hara wrote one of the great odes to smitten-ness, and I hope mine is at least a variation on that theme—though I dwell instead on the gut-punch when two lovers quarrel. I was trying to be honest about those moments when love, precisely because of its intensity, feels a lot like devastation.”
—Patrick Phillips