Chicken Fever

by Philip Schaefer

Winner, 2019 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize
selected by Tarfia Faizullah

Winter is killing everyone I know. On the radio
today the DJ mumbled mercy is for pussies and like God
I started to doubt my existence. In the crawlspace
of the attic I hide cubed cheese and by the floorboards
lay traps. It’s a miracle to believe you’re alive at all. Field mice
run wild through my mind late at night and their tails bleed
a red so pink you could swallow your tongue just
to become a different person. Doesn’t that sound nice.
Drowning inside yourself, flailing like a kite mid-storm.
Let’s play truth or dare but you go first and forever
return to that perversion of yourself you put behind bars
years ago. Of course I’m in my mother’s underwear again, eating
candy. I’m on top of the roof with a megaphone and a hatchet
canceling out the weather. Love is a peacock in outer
space. There is nothing more cruel and satisfying
than having wings you cannot use. Twice already I’ve tried
to sleep fully clothed while sober. Call it head lice for the soul.
Call it by name. The only game worth playing involves dice
and cancer. Here, in the sweet thick middle of misery, children
build tree forts. Fathers watch TV. Angels fall and call it flying.

Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. He won the 2018 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize published by The Puritan, the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in the Poetry Society of America. Some poems can be found in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, Adroit, Redivider, and BOAAT among others. He’s opening a tequila bar in Missoula, Montana.