The Scientist

Do not think I ever actually loved you / it was the poet / not the girl / the poet who wants to be rejected so she can use words like visceral / to describe the bitter taste of the earth / the dust / the blood / pooling in my mouth / the poet who wants to be in love so she can say her heart is a bird in a cage / ribcage / beating against bone and sinew / it was the poet whose heart you broke / but she simply arrayed all the mangled pieces out in front of her / all the clockwork / the veins and flesh / place diaphanous slices of tissue on microscope slides to observe the damage / catalogue in metaphor / find the spring constant / how far can I stretch before breaking / oh the poet wants to break and suffer and live and wants you and doesn’t / the poet will fail just to see how it feels / examine her every fear until she is nauseous / just to write about it / just to preserve it / embalm every feeling / self-vivisect in front of you / hypothesise and graph every moment as sonnets and sestinas / walk home at night just to see all the stars burning out / running on gas and fumes / cold air on my neck / I only think of you when I write / you have become imagery and metaphor / the afterglow / not the thing burning

Emma Philips is currently being driven insane by physics labs at the University of Auckland (Waipapa Taumata Rau) and spends too much time writing poetry in maths lectures. Previously, her work has won the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day Youth competition and 2023 Sunday Star Time Short Story Competition secondary school category. Her poetry can be found in Starling, the Quick Brown Dog Journal, A Fine Line and her flash fiction can be found in Finger Comma Toes and Changing Landscapes.