> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # One Poem by Emily Hunt - URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-emily-hunt/ - Published: 2018-02-21T12:00:35.000Z - Updated: 2025-11-24T16:25:29.000Z - Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Emily Hunt for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. - Author: Wendy Xu - Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/l1001317.jpg) Daniel Arsham, “Future Relic 05” (2016) (image courtesy the artist) ## LANDLINE A phone was screwed to the wall by the shower. A clear one, with blue cords so everything was visible. The tangled system of a single, labeled thing. I thought: rows of them coded, packed, stacks for sale. Phones like sleeping backs in the dark. How each current would twist through the body of its device snaking, tied to the others, a fine line to the outlet and live hot inside the wires. \* When I used it, spine against the tile, splayed limbs, a skating eye on the grout, he would listen in from the floor below, a smooth receiver to his ear in a room he called his office, where he browsed the internet for hours in the sun. He would at times bark into the phone, like a dog, or just breathe. He could pick it up, my voice, cut it off. Could then refer to it, enraged, or ignore it, like dry clay. Feral in this way he could not be disturbed raking the morning or the late afternoon, taking, resting, boiling, a human in his way. \* Warm soil, I would call to get the endless drone of the busy signal. Concrete, pavement, dandelions and tires I would trace the rough curve of the school making my way to the spare room phone extra slow to join each mild shadow as if to sidestep the result, to push through and past, to trash the minutes, seconds, flipping into deep bland hours, pillowy and cruel. I thought: I would return and I would return to the bright, basement level vacant evening classroom where 1688 was written in long loops of chalk marking the vast, flat lawn of the display cold under flies and lint in the lights when it rained. Battle on the board, body for something. My recent history local and beating. Related I could draw a number or a word, a dry, wood base and dirt for the flower I could erase. Could write the date, my ride elsewhere deep in a computer, his sense of time gone. \* When he slept heavily at the head of the table, a man in a chair, shut down flickering and drowned, a body with a plate in front of him, I would cross with a groundless warm gaze his long lashes, each linked floating face in the room, the mound of my food, I would think my way through the unified regions of the brain. The things that happened bled into the language we exchanged. \* I imagine that now the psychotic hold phones in their beds and naturally like magnets they absorb hundreds of videos, short ones, a quarter way through or several times in a row, gliding past pausing, going suddenly loud, mute, these screens may perk or spark a kind of rest or yield the opposite effect, as any wet free walk through the woods or trip to the store can, any glued green photo of a pea, real pea in a cold can. \* Verizon, mygreatlakes.org therealreal.comaookgram gmaiTwitrmymother calls as I’m approaching the shallow stone steps leading up to the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. 100 Larkin Street, cool sun, wind, clearing itself of the day, so steady it’s unnoticeable. Dry palm in its costume, gold road leaning toward a stuck tree. Black leaves underneath. Dirt below the buildings, earth beneath the built dirt. Hungry, my luck released from the screen: Marketing and Communications Assistant. Digital Engagement AssociateFarmfruits dried mud ghost prints on tight yellow tents, and as we talk the market closes down with pleasure. She tells me my brother is in jail for threatening to murder my parents at dinner, then acting this out at full speed. Pushing them down to the ground, reaching again like lightning for a knife, cops and neighbors staring, the moist air, the moist eyes of strangers, a narrowed glaring public: Atlanta, ivy and dimmed flaming maples at night. \* They tried to call him in there. Then, they learned the rule. He would not be reached, his body in action, his body at rest in the cell. \* When he faded heavily across from me a boy in a chair, with a plate in front of him, his hair growing close to his food, his food going nowhere I would look at his long lashes and think my startled way through the separate young and flashing regions of the brain. That soaked place, crossing a wet, live wire to the famous mind, having made with mud the skull, having held in class the pale human organ with yellow gloves larger than my hands having drawn the whole eye: sight, as if it had been sliced, colored in the freest liquid space, to learn the shape, having labeled the pupil, having thought to exchange the view as if hanging a coat on a branch it bled into, turning, to arrive at a future, drawn and scrolling, to exchange my roots for some roaming poem online, \* \* \* Emily Hunt is the author of [*Dark Green*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/098846439X/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (The Song Cave, 2015), named a “standout debut” by Publishers Weekly and a “Must-Read Poetry Debut” by Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in PEN Poetry Series, *The Iowa Review*, *TYPO*, and many other journals. More work and info at [emilyrhunt.org](http://www.emilyrhunt.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com).