"Having a Fight With You" by Patrick Phillips

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January 11, 2022 

Having a Fight With You

Patrick Phillips

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

Patrick Phillips is the author of Song of the Closing Doors, forthcoming from Knopf in 2022. The recipient of an American Book Award as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Program, he lives in San Francisco. 

Song of the Closing Doors
(Knopf, 2022)

“Mottled Tuesday” by John Ashbery
read more
“Having a Coke with You” by Frank O'Hara
read more

Thanks to Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Legaspi’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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