Poetry: Selections from Phil Eggers

What Else?

Help is your favorite tune your partner sings in the shower,

Their voice drifting through the cracks between the doorframe

In echoey reverb, a soothing balm,

A key for escaping

An anxious mind in a prison of its own making.

Help is the first warm drop of rain in June;

It is the cooing of mating mourning doves nesting under your A/C window unit;

The bodega clerk that’s always there to share a knowing side eye at whatever crazy chaos is engulfing the block.

Help is a sympathetic sigh.

But even better

An empathetic grunt:

Solidarity in the salt mines, my friend.

Help is the awkward first hug

You share with a friend you don’t yet realize you’ve made for life.

It is the table cloth,

The slice of bread,

The cup of wine.

Help abounds.

Help surrounds.

Help is on the way.

What else?

Help is a place you can touch,

A hand you can hold,

If only you would unfurl that fist for fighting

Into a palm of open reception.

What else?

Help is here.

I Ask my Roommates Cat to Shut Up

Shut up, cat.

Shut up.

Shut

Up,

Cat.

Shut up.

Please,

Cat,

Shut up.

Content

I prayed with youthful hope,

Now seasoned with age,

Salt and pepper serving at the temple,

That each new sunrise

Would clear the board of my concerns

And place the pieces of my problems

Back in the bag and back in the box,

Ready for a reset and novel strategy.

But truth be told

I’ve only spun back to where I was already,

Stuck plucking abnormal eyebrow hairs

Like some balding caterpillar

And re-steeping yesterday afternoon’s green tea

Milking out the final morsels of bracing astringency.

But tell me

Is there that much more happiness

That cannot already be found

In a Sixth Avenue corndog

Under a jaundiced November sky?

                                                      (Thirty-fifth winter and counting.)

Let the world turn on then,

And I will count myself lucky

To have stood so still for so long.

Phil Eggers is a poet and painter living in Brooklyn, NY. A 2020 finalist for Brooklyn Poets' Yawp Poem of the Year, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Thimble Lit Mag, Vita Brevis, Red Wheelbarrow, and Cobra Milk Lit Mag.