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  • Ransom
  • Philip Schaefer (bio)

Children disappear on a milk carton. Catsand dogs on a lamppost. We are all hangingonto something more stable. When I dieI want to be an exposé. Picture a long matchstick next to a haystack next to a red gallonof quiet gasoline. A beautiful woman olderthan time draws water from the well nearby.Planes tick off and on like ornaments, decoratingthe night. Picture her as your wife. The endlessthirst for more. There is a cooling calmto amnesia, to letting your bones do the thinking.Once, years ago, alone on the rooftop, I watchedhalogen flower in my fingernails. The moon brokeinto a pool cue I held in my mouth, my voicelike a vase of ash. The difference between a knifeand gravity? How far the head floats from the body. [End Page 81]

Philip Schaefer

Philip Schaefer's first collection of poems, Bad Summon, won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press in 2017. He is the author of three chapbooks, two of which were cowritten with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor's Prize in poetry and has individual work out or due out in Thrush, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Birdfeast, Salt Hill, Bat City, BOAAT, Baltimore Review, and Passages North, among others. He tends bar in Missoula, Montana.

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