Perpetual Country (Kick the Wall), by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney

Philip Schaefer’s debut collection, Bad Summon, won the Agha Shahid
Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press, 2017). Individual work can be
found in Kenyon Review, Thrush, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, Bat City,
Adroit, and Passages North. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.

Jeff Whitney is the author of The Tree With Lights in it (Thrush Press), while
Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press) and Smoke Tones (Phantom Books) were
co-written with Philip Schaefer. His poems can be found in Adroit, Beloit
Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, and Poetry Northwest. He lives in
Portland.


About the poem:
The two poems in this issue were written as collaborations [by Philip Schaefer
and Jeff Whitney]. The process of putting them together was quite haphazard,
involving lots of cutting and Frankensteinian rearranging with other pieces
of writing we did together and individually. The result is a pair of poems that
contain both our voices and, hopefully, some third voice bubbling under that is
neither of us.