He never died and died and lives like that,
Renewed by whatever mewling YouTube
Hot take the hate-hot laptop searing his lap
Calls painful pleasure and then pleasing pain.
Shaken shut, he opened up to the prune
In his head and said he would kill a kid
If he had to, having the aptitude
To do it confirmed by a test he took
A few months prior to changing his look.
—Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s next book of poems, Silver, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic.
