This Beautiful Thing Is Making Me So Depressed

 

 
 
 
                                    as if endings didn’t

 

have their beginnings

in mind, some well-meaning someone says to take it

 

        one day

at a time, so I take it like some heroin-mirror—neatly prescribed.

 

it’s spring, which the sun knows,

            which the birds know

        because they’re all lungs, but there’s still this whole

 

rhetorical question of snow, asked by everything—

 

        THE PINES, for instance:

        How fucking fresh are we?

 

My boot tread’s ice-packed, but the buds still flash

            as if from under a trench-

 

         coat. Goddammit,

nothing’s enough yet

                   everything isn’t.

 

 

Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Signaletics (2013) and Groundspeed (2016), and three chapbooks. Her poems and lyric essays appear widely in literary publications including Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.