Hymn GasolineI want to remember what it feels like to hurt and be hurt. Paint me wild hydrangea orange, a truck in the 70s flashing down a Montana highway without regret. Paint me the glowing skull of a cigarette. We try to be good to each other until we aren't. I want someone to paint and mop their hair in splatter. Run it across the walls and furniture. A man or a woman may place a baby between ruffles of trash in the alley and think it comfort. Paint hate and call it exactly that. I am so afraid of who we will become. Trees burning from high noon sun knowing nothing of smoke. Let's stay up all night until the moon is a mirror of silk power. Let's bloom into gods, sea anemone. Someday we will all wear tarpaulins and drink rosewater and break songs from the river's laughter and know why blue begins as crystal then suffers from peen hammer. Let's paint our insides blood, fuse red. Philip Schaefer is the author of three chapbooks. [Hideous] Miraculous is available from BOAAT Press, while Radio Silence (forthcoming 2016 from Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (available from Phantom Books) were co-written with poet Jeff Whitney. Individual work is out or due out in Thrush, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Forklift Ohio, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, H_NGM_N, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, and Hayden's Ferry Review among others. He tends bar at a craft distillery in Missoula, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana. |