Mercy

ISSUE: Spring 2010

Like two wrestlers etched
around some ancient urn,

we’d lace our hands, then wrench
each other’s wrists back

until the muscles ached
and the tendons burned,

and one brother or the other
grunted mercy—a game

we played so many times
I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done:

when the oldest rose
like my brother’s ghost,

grappling with the little
ghost I was at ten—

who cried out Mercy!
in my own voice Mercy!

as I watched from deep
inside my father’s skin.

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.