8 Ball Liturgy + When To Say No

8 Ball Liturgy

I replace my fingertips with olives, 10
crystal balls. I voodoo around the kitchen

like I’ve discovered a cure for stomach
cancer. I give each globe a name: polly polyp,

lung crust, see you tumorrow. Inhale the brine.
Lately I’ve been trying to mix it up: a cold one

for breakfast, mountain hikes at midnight.
If you read a poem backwards a tectonic plate

might shift in your brain. A mouse growing feathers,
the friend you hadn’t spoken to in months

not dead. Abracadabra. Candy Man. I chug a glass
of milk & feel the ocean flood my eyeballs.

We are porous at best. When the phone rings
I speak cursive. I rub the belly of an old trumpet

& ask for 3 wishes. But you can’t bring them back,
even in cartoons. I spit out a brass sound, salute

the dog as emperor of sad noises. When I bow, I kiss
the ground. I hear you, Parker, we’re not going anywhere.

When To Say No

You must advocate for yourself but never have an ego.

When you wake up from your lucid dream, no one will listen

to your poor depiction. Start over. On the television

tonight a man with fluorescent cheek bones proposed to 2

women w/a rose in his mouth like a lost hypotenuse,

an emotion of what? I’m eating leftovers in Paris Texas

which is like watching a basketball deflate in a cold basement

over a period of lifetimes. You must advocate for drinking

anything alone b/c there is nothing more sad & perfect.

My first dog is dying so I spend too much on a pair of jeans.

You must advocate for something. Not paying the parking

tickets, lighting a cigar in the afternoon where the sun

turns the grass into an ocean of smoke. I have a phone call

tomorrow w/a loan officer named Rick. My only goal

is to make him uncomfortable somehow. I know my debts

are real. But give me some credit w/o saying so. Buy me

some time, Rick. In the kitchen of forgiveness there’s a pair

of neon yellow latex gloves which make you invisible.

How wonderful to be so impervious. What if we’re all monks

climbing a stone staircase to nowhere, advocating for nothing

where nothing is loudest? My name is the canyon I’m falling in.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.