Having A Fight With You

By Patrick Phillips

is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV.

It’s like waking with scalpels
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.

Having a fight with you
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper
that says you never loved me—

my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.