My first declared crushes on men

weren’t crushes exactly. Envies, more like.

 

Not that I wanted to be

a man. But I wanted to be

 

in his place, with arms like that—

nude pantyhose filled with huge

 

onions. And with those high-waisted pants!

Crawling on the floor toward her,

 

I’d lip-synch a song I couldn’t sing.

Maybe a kissing

 

stunt double.

(Or else a different story.)

 

I practiced the lines.

Same way I had the Mulder

 

action figure

and not the Scully.

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Emilia Phillips (she/her/hers) is the author of four poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including the forthcoming Embouchure (2021), and four chapbooks. Winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2019–2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship, Phillips’s poems, lyric essays, and book reviews appear widely in literary publications including Agni, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, Publisher’s Weekly, and elsewhere. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro.