by Jeannie Yoon
I am learning to walk while loving
Still tripping into the ditches
Astride the rocky road
A clear and searing day
Burns the air thick and heavy
Singing my nose and my atrophying
Tongue turns restless
In its desiccated bed
The TV bitches splayed on the sands
Of Miami or something
Smell like synthetic coconut
I should get up
I get up
I don’t know what to do with you
Or whither to step, how far
This has less to do with who you are
Than six-year-old me appearing alone
In scores of tableaux sheaved
In shelves of memory
Laid out room by room
We lived above a vast cellar
Set off by slate blue paint on the exterior
In whose shade grew violets
And three vain roses
And the milk expired
And the periodic shaving
Of the man’s haired cheek
And the long grass
Was cool in the afternoon.
I did love you, once.
Whatever radiance of that still quivers
Subliminal, through me, is decaying.
Mirrored sunglasses set off
His excellent face, lean and grinning
Some distance angled from mine
Eyes on the road
I blink and so is uncovered
The wide and imperceptible
Spread of things
A good hard look
I have countless simultaneous themes to resolve
Before I conclude, so why
Should I keep you?
I’m up tonight
Squeezing and releasing your waning
Afterimage, dissolving in light
Which is pressed against darkness
I will it to end
My body is an intersection at rest
I am a colony of life
I am a home for death
I am a whetstone for the language