Pastoral (With One’s Head Out the Car Window)

← v14n1, Spring 2015

Although drizzle nettles the cheeks red

& one’s ears fill with wind’s grey-green noise—

there’s clover & honeysuckle, the cheeks held

intimately by almost nothing. Once, everything

we couldn’t understand was made through similes

of nature. Now the trees look like telephone

poles. A wingspan, a hanging up receiver.

nature technology travel

Emilia Phillips

Emilia Phillips is the author of four poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, most recently Embouchure (2021), and four chapbooks. Phillips’s poems, lyric essays, and book reviews have appeared in AGNI , The American Poetry Review , Gulf Coast , Kenyon Review , New England Review , The New York Times , Ploughshares , and elsewhere. Phillips is the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2019–2020 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. They are a faculty member in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and cross-appointed faculty in the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program. Photo by Felipe Troncoso