by Nathan Lipps
Phenomenological Summertime Cocktail
I have yet learned to be
though I look for you who has.
I am sitting down in the Midwest.
Exactly in the middle. Listening to the sound of cattle
and the song of their shit in the pasture.
They won’t be here in spring
like so many things.
Later, I am breathing in old roof shingles
tar and decades of their attempt at definition
now being removed from a shape
that was once our home
against this noon
on a July day too far away
from any sensible
body of water.
We think of what we want.
This the flower, that the weed.
In the dirt.
Everything in the dirt.
The dirt which we know
by pressing our fluids into.
Giving, hoping it takes.
Searching for the border of a field
that by explaining its frame
we’ve said something about ourselves.
Nathan Lipps lives and works in the Midwest and is the author of the chapbook, the body as passage. He is the recipient of the Peter Taylor Fellowship and WSU Poetry Fellowship. His work has been included in Best New Poets, BOAAT, EcoTheo Review, North American Review, TYPO, and Third Coast. You can find him at nathanlipps.com.