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    Embouchure: poems
    Embouchure: poems
    Embouchure: poems
    Ebook122 pages5 hours

    Embouchure: poems

    By Emilia Phillips

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    About this ebook

    An embouchure is the way in which a wind musician applies their mouth to an instrument's mouthpiece, and Embouchure, Emilia Phillips's fourth poetry collection, sets its mouth, ready to play. Trumpeting a picaresque coming out story, the poems are at turns self-deprecatory and revelatory, exploring sexual fluidity and non-monosexuality. From the speaker's adolescent crushes to her closeted 20s to her eventual acceptance of queerness, her disarming joy—even at her own mistakes—is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity and reckonings with anticipatory anxiety. The tomboy the speaker once was is transfigured into “a presexual soft butch / Medusa” with a “beautiful, beautiful / body that didn't know yet // how to contain itself.” Elsewhere, the speaker evades a Dickinsonian personification of Death, who seems more like an inescapable ex-boyfriend than a welcome bridegroom. Phillips's mock-confessionalism is as brassy as it is vulnerable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Akron Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2021
    ISBN9781629222158
    Embouchure: poems

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      Book preview

      Embouchure - Emilia Phillips

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Let us go back from the mountain, down to the plain.

      —FROM GILGAMESH

      Girl, you’ve got an ass like I’ve never seen.

      —PRINCE

      AGE OF BEAUTY

      This is not an age of beauty,

      I say to the Rite-Aid as I pass a knee-high plastic witch

      whose speaker-box laugh is tripped by my calf

      breaking the invisible line cast by her motion

      sensor. My heart believes it is a muscle

      of love, so how do I tell it it is a muscle of blood?

      This morning, I found myself

      awake before my alarm and felt I’d been betrayed

      by someone. My sleep is as thin as a paper bill

      backed by black bars that iridesce

      indigo in the federal reserve of

      dreams. Look, I said to the horse’s

      head I saw severed and then set on the ground, the soft

      tissue of the cheek and crown cleaved with a necropsy

      knife until the skull was visible. You look more

      horse than the horses

      with names and quilted coats in the pasture, grazing, unbothered

      by your body in pieces, steaming

      against the drizzle. You once had a name

      that filled your ears like amphitheaters,

      that caused an electrical

      spark to bead to your brain. My grief was born

      in the wrong time, my grief an old soul, grief re-

      incarnate. My grief, once a black-winged

      beetle. How I find every excuse to indulge it, like a child

      given quarters. In the restaurant, eating alone,

      instead of interrogating my own

      solitude, I’m nearly undone by the old

      woman on her own. The window so filthy,

      it won’t even reflect her face, which must not be the same

      face she sees when she dreams

      of herself in the third person.

      *

      MY MOTHER CONFESSED I WAS CONCEIVED TO RAVEL’S BOLÉRO

      And so began the formality

      of my embarrassment. The nightly

      polishing of the borrowed brass

      buttons that open & close

      my heart like a soldier’s

      jacket. In time, I learned

      how to tie the blue silk

      ampersand (under, over, & in)

      at my throat, just below the absence

      where a crabapple would have

      bobbed if I had swallowed

      one in the womb. Now

      I wear white gloves when attending

      to my worry’s tripleting:

      what if what if what if—

      I am made of a man who took himself

      too seriously, whose naked chest

      was an advertisement

      for undershirts, & of a woman

      who made him a season,

      only to despise his storms.

      If I had been a boy, my name

      would have been Alexander.

      (If I had been a boy, my father would’ve excused my behavior.)

      Sometimes I fool myself

      into believing my eyelids crash

      like cymbals when I refuse to

      look dead in the mirror, silk blue

      in the seemly dawn. Sometimes

      I imagine myself with a third leg, pantomimed

      with the butt of a rifle, so I can dance

      properly in time to the heart’s murmured 3/4.

      THE CAST, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

      First it was the midwife whom my father gave a dozen red

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