- Receiving Line Stanzas
—after Xenophanes, frag. 21
For now the floor is clean;the hands of all and the cups, clean—
A guest re-knots a ribbon,another passes arounda perfume sample ripped
from a magazine;the punch bowl stands full, and wine,mild as the couriered–
in arrangements,is handed
overin bottles that swear never to contain. [End Page 30]
Emilia Phillips is the author of Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013) and two chapbooks. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry appears in AGNI, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She serves as the prose editor of 32 Poems, on staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and as the 2013–2014 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.