Jake Phillips

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When the Dog Finds a Small Spine in the Woods

After Octavia E. Butler & Oliver Baez Bendorf

if god is change:
I am the beloved
backbone besot
with the rotting tender
of spring, fresh
day after snowmelt
crying out, waiting
for the tongue
to find me

can anyone find me

here among the dead
of last year

lost in sad cellulose
the last mangy
bit uneaten
unloved
seasonally
depressed

there’s a curvature
to the collection
of sky
in the pitch of night
all the lovely bright
clusters my vertebrae
will never know

all the burning that made
bone
that made
the god that tore
the rest & hear this
this quiet now
& the god approaching

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Jake Phillips is a queer poet from Rhode Island. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, an alum of the Fine Arts Works Center summer workshop, and a recipient of a 2024 Make Art Grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. His poetry is published in AGNI, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.

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