Kitchen

ISSUE: Spring 2007

I can see the grout between the bricks
and hear the Hot Wheel clatter
as it fishtails, and then flips.

The stove like some experiment:
clouds of sweet steam belching
each time my mother lifts
the stock pot’s sweaty lid.

My sister’s busy with her ponies.
My brother in the fortress of his room.

So I alone sprawl at her feet—
the same age, and in
exactly the same mood

as my son, now, in the kitchen
where soon we will
have lived so long ago.

Patrick Phillips

Patrick Phillips’s first book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Norton, 2016), was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Phillips is also the author of Song of the Closing Doors (Knopf, 2022), Chattahoochee (Arkansas UP, 2004), and Boy (Georgia UP/VQR, 2008). His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, the New England Review, and the Nation. His awards include a Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry from VQR. Phillips teaches writing and literature at Stanford.