Appeal of the appeal

Clever girl, but it’s a cleverer world. The television will make you tremble with how little it makes you feel. Throw a throat punch. Come back to reality, or its approximation.

What’s the appeal of this appeal? How long for the cold, cold, colder, freezing, warmer, hot, hot, hot war? And will the ads for it be cheesy? Will I look sexy in the pictures? What’s the reveal of this appeal? Man behind the curtain, appear to me in velvet, in furs. Come up to me and then close the door behind us.

Blustery Tokyo at my back as Margot complains that she’s not good enough, her voice wavery when it emerges from inside her oversized synthetic fur coat, and my first instinct is to fling myself bloody against a wall rather than commiserate with her. When she compares herself with younger women, my mind flees from the bog of this cliché into incoming traffic. I bounce comically off a parade of glittering chrome hoods. In the Impressionist rendering of this event, passerby in red and blue oils pause to watch from the sidewalk at the dark edge of the canvas, umbrellas up in the streaks of rain. “Margot, baby,” my wet, broken body cries out via improbable speech bubble, “Wake up and smell the coffee!”

In a crowded room, I look for you. In a crowded room, I look for you. In a crowded room, I look for you. Lie to me. Lie to me. Lie to me, when I ask if you look for me too.

Look, big ocean roller, I may be a lifetime user but I never subscribed to your newsletter. I don’t care to be reminded of the shadow of you. Good country with a bad king. Or bad country with a diamond ring? What promises and what deals. What flagging fidelity. The count tapping bare feet on the rich carpet. Bad seed from the towering oak. Cut it down and never repent. Cut it down and fantasize about the life you took in exchange for the life you don’t lead.

Come to dinner / 合宿

At the low, chestnut-colored table, trying to philosophize in my broken Japanese, I realize that eventually you get old enough that your goals become memories. You didn’t mean to leave them behind, on the rusted road, but there they are in the rearview: monkey masks on monkey faces, the missing left leg of Christ of Nazareth. The knotted rope that could have been undone, with the right application of pressure. But then again, there’s always the sword.

Alvin says, “Everything takes reps.” I have received this revelation before. Habit, the bloodiest and (therefore?) truest God. Alvin says, “The point is to do two things simultaneously.” Ah, there it is. Nothing is one thing. At minimum, two; usually, a hundred billion. Alvin comes out when I’m on the bench in the blue afternoon by the white and yellow irises and asks, “aren’t you cold?” and I reply, cheerfully, in the negative. I’ve been tracking one puffy cloud in the sky all hour, all my life.

During my favorite kata, there’s a moment in the middle when the practitioners all stomp their foot in perfect unison and it stops my heart every time. How to describe this in a way that will land? Brined in seed oil, chicken tender. Step on the face of the pietà and break your faith but prove it at the same time. Scar the knife with blood, knife the scar with intent. Two things, human and divine. Two things, soft and strong.

Hand injury

In silk boxing shorts, flung into the air. Blood in a diamond under the nail of my ring finger. Leg cramping like heartache.

Why couldn’t I be like this before? The thought pursues me up the road, nipping at my heels. Why couldn’t I be like this before? I turn and scratch it behind the ears. Maybe I was not ready to give what I needed to give. I can still feel the elastic membrane in me, showing me where I have left to grow. But for the first time, when I probe inside, I also feel the slim cylinder of iron that holds me together. No, it wasn’t always there. I extruded it with time, through the press of my mind. I grasp it as though taking up a sword. I grasp it and let go. Won’t Alvin be surprised, when he turns the corner in this seedy motel and sees me surrounded by arrows?

Associate me with citrus, with pine needles, with injuries to the hand. Sentence me to a lifetime and then to another one. Don’t let me die before pain has left my bed. Clothe me in white moonlight, in wayfinding that streaks the water in blonde. All this, because a loser wanted to feel important. Good luck, class of 2025.

Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too?

Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Oh, it hurts but I’ll say it again: Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Relentless, the disappointment of expectations rendered to fatty string. Fruitless, yellow moon hanging limply from the vine. Telephone cables in the purple night. I look up and feel a churning in my chest like crying. Is forgiveness friend or foe? Based on how she feels inside me, I hardly know. Surrounded by black leather sandbags and broken wreaths of laurel, at the center of my soul, where she rests in the toilet bowl.

Truth was not able to set me free, so will fantasy work instead? I cannot make the right turn—foot across the body, scraping the floor—without trembling. (I pray that Alvin doesn’t notice but he meets my eyes and I see that he does.) The next time I try it, I hold my face in my hands and I say: Your body is a pillar of iron, you cannot falter because it is not in your nature. Then, when I make the turn, I do not fall. Oh, shock of faith, a psalm dutifully read though not even fully believed. Sashimi in the display case, red fish blood pooled at the green plastic corners. Remix me, run to me. To think that the scene of the crime is also a place of light.

I have always been a problem but I did not realize I could be my own solution. I took myself for what I was for so long that I forgot I could be something else entirely. I am closer to the Great than he was to the pyramids, but I cannot know if I am closer to my death than to my birth. History in the amniotic fluid, the future, the gilled girl in its belly. When my name came out bare, neither of us flinched. (Now I realize that every lesson pain taught me, love would have willingly taught me three times over—)

Faded love

You’re fighting types, but don’t heat up, he says. Don’t heat up? But to lock eyes is to kiss her, to punch her is to confess warped, barbed love. To block her hit, foot on calf, palm on wrist, and plunge in from behind is to pledge my every goal, gold piece and gland to her. What does she see, when she looks at me?

Attack, almond-colored wasp-eye. Defend, silver-gilled carp-fin. Between us, infinity that thins to threads of lambswool.

You’re too close, says the voyeur coolly, after a moment’s observation. (What does he see, when he looks at me? But I cannot spend too long on this thought without losing my nerve to the blister of the ocean.) You’re vulnerable at that distance, he says. He’s right, of course. I can’t help but get too close and then, one-two, pay the consequences. Sieve wet grounds out of the sensual and then slip, ka-ching, on Charon’s currency, produced from throat and hands, left in foamy coins on the mats. My back against the wall, legs shaking, a wad of bloody tissues pressed to my face like a corsage on a breast, white rose on my pulse. Imagine all the flowers in my garden, picked too early to calm the need.

Still, it’s an open invitation. Hurt me and see if I don’t smile after. Hurt me and see if I don’t say, no problem. Catch up to me, reaching with one hand to touch and grab the canvas hem. Catch your breath then, when you catch my eye. The goopy glycerin and dramatic red of this feeling. Catch my drift, rolling around the backseat, and then come over the waterfall with me. Catch my hand somewhere it shouldn’t be.

Don’t give up, he says, singling me out from the crowd for this instruction. (Don’t go.) Don’t attack and then retreat. Pick a fight. Reach a conclusion that is both dark and light. So I push forward, aiming at the midsection beneath the heart, and I can’t tell if his surprise is good or bad. Good or bad? Real or fake? Guilt or purity? But when you need to do and not only think, these geometries lose their grip. True and false receding into the mirrors, yielding to the fluid exchange of pain and spirit.

You love this, he says, and, fidgeting at the table, I hesitate before agreeing because I know I was unclean before this tale even began. Look at me, don’t deny it, it’s true, after all, I would know—I was unclean before this ever started. Is this a joke or oath, broken or bested, too much or too little? Oh, I was too quick to say the geometries have lost their grip. That cannot come so easily. Yes, no, neither. But laugh a little with me, despite this failure. Step back into the fight. Back into the ring, hands-up, chest-first. We need the hope and the irony, don’t we, to make sense of the faded love letters? To wash the blood away from their closures? Yes, no, neither. Some part of my flesh will always remember the stain that made a ditch of heaven. (But when I see you, across the room, watching me in sudden blurry pinkish gentleness, for a moment, I feel I still might yet get clean.)

Plight of the Haier JW-C55A

I drop my mind in the drum and break the washing machine as a result. I can see its pale, scrappy face, wedged like a wishbone into a crack in the bowl. I try to drag it out but it slips, laughing, from my fingers. Fine, stay there. See if I care.

Strung out, prisoner. Funny money, broken heart.

I once had wisdom. I know I did. I remember its mark on me, anvil-shaped. I wish I had known that wisdom was something you could lose, that it was not forever, once accrued. To think that it can be excised from you from one night to the next by a masked and gowned surgeon, scalpel at the ready, through the open window. New moon observing coolly at his back. Take that, tooth fairy.

Hopes, dashed out against the wall. Signs, whorls in the changing sand.

Forgive me, or don’t. See if I care. God, I do. Tech bubble, 2000s revival. My gummy, stained, red-ribboned childhood of Pax Americana, family faida. But still I cannot remember ever having been so crushed as I am at this moment. Following the perfect lines on the mats with my dagger. If I lift my gaze and find you there, who knows what my face could reveal. Never healing from the beating I took from your horseshoe.

Living large at Camp Century

Today in bad ideas.

Vomit on the train platform, there and back. Orange splotches on a hospital mask. Winter light, winter light. Waiting for a moment to fall on you. Emotional grammar of the traumnovelle. Don’t flinch. Do your best. As two fighters with a dangerous natural curiosity, I feel we may have much in common. I fear we may have much in common. There and back, winter light.

Hands in fists, I watch horror movies and then I lucid dream. I panic. I won’t meet my eyes in the mirror. Could I ever hold my own gaze with real revelation, as though I’d just caught it one-handed from a great height? Could I do that without feeling unlucky to have been standing where I stood? Get me a horse whose hide I can skin and tan.

I have to believe in you because the blood stains of the massacre were visible from space. Sticky red pools in the rows of wheat. Purpling flesh in wavy heat, plums split on the ground. I have to believe because a child has died, is dying, will die. I have to believe because we have overextended empire and now reap only the desert beyond. That horse I killed could have kissed my teary eyes over the dunes, but I never possessed foresight, did I? So I travel the sands alone, grains of scarlet caught in my cloven hooves. But wretched as I am I still believe that you are one of my own, and I, one of yours. In this interregnum of vomit and light, of comets and light, I must believe that I cannot leave this dream. Faith, rolling fruit in the grass. Roots, hacked off bluntly, trenches bored into apricot-blue ice, disproportionate. Female Fantasies, Volume 1.

Detrás de ti voy / Yo, que siempre espero que vengan a mí

True, that my spirit is broken in fourteen places; true, that my macros are excellent; true, that I like blood sport; true, that I have fallen in love. Fast-walking my Tokyo neighborhood, arms out like an exiled penguin, I ascend a puke-green bridge to admire the cars, their red lights at ash-strewn dusk like divine intervention, or at least divine warning. Chasing a high that is tragedy on tragedy on tragedy on tragedy on tragedy.

In my house, there are many rooms.

Don’t let your guard down. Don’t get your guard down. Above all else, don’t let your guard down. Feet and hands arrive together, in a lockstep that is almost intimate. Distance into overzealous touch and then back into distance. Fists like keys. Right leg, a pillar; left leg, sweeping for mines. Hand extended, pitifully. Come over here and let me hold you. Oh, but don’t let your guard down. Briefly blinded by flesh and rags. Lose your time, your eyes, your every single gilded treasure, but don’t let your guard down. A lanky, long-tongued dog appears in the corner of the room, scratching up the tatami, and oh my fucking God, I’ve just been hit in the face. The four brocaded walls of my cranium, rattling cylindrically. I said, don’t let your guard down! But struck once, a sequel is inevitable, and I receive this second blow dutifully, like a child at communion. Better than expected, worse than hoped. The shelter where I was hiding last night, under the moon in the black copse, collapses in one terrific go. You retrieve the bricks to then build the house I will die in.

In my house, there are many rooms.

I don’t have the moral courage to end this. Hamartia will groan from underneath me, sweaty on the bedsheets, and rise to devour me whole. Saturn and his son, you and my pearl. I take you with me always. Staring at the shy light bleeding out from under the edge of a dark rain cloud. Blue of a contusion, gold in scattered ribbons. Light stretching out, like a cat or goddess, onto the bedspread. I am filled with frightening joy, and not because this reminds me of anything or because it is symbolic of something or because I can craft a metaphor or story from its raw material. I am filled with joy at the observation, the sensation. Action of the sky, equal and opposite reaction of the heart. Translucent, eternal becomes, in me, dense, momentary. So much tender and idle beauty. Don’t push your punches. Don’t let your guard down.

Speaking of which—

In my house, there are no rooms. I’ll wait for you tonight instead at the park, perched on the rusty rungs leading up to the red plastic slide. You say jump, I say how high. Come and meet me and let us fight and draw only a little blood.

Tower of lessons; hole of punishment

I don’t want to be told yes. I don’t want to be told no. At the Moonlight Hotel in the Petaling District, the concierge looks me up and down and then directs me, with the solemnity of an archangel delivering the burden of the inevitable, to the bar across the street. Looking down as I dart across the tar, my mind is briefly netted by the streaks of dark red light that swim in the gutter puddles. Drifting, garnet tadpoles. The metabolism of the red and tender, that is, the glimmer of the other than affirms contrast, scarlet to my baby blue, that promises togetherness despite difference. To be so entranced is to know I still have some vital force left to me. Right? I still have some life left, however meagre? The staggered lines of cars watch me, a bowed and penitent shadow against the headlights.

I’m deep inside the grotto of the bar—far, far too late to back out—when I finally notice him, the man I never dated. It’s the iris of my id that recognizes him first: the straightness of his back, perfect posture to the last. Then I feel, like the yank of a rope around my waist, the pull from the cratered gold moon inside his torso. His gravity catches my breath like a fish on a hook. I wriggle pointlessly, a spotted mackerel with a split of red on my gilled neck, a sprig of parsley and lemon wedge against my solar plexus. Then, to my horror, I register another feeling: the relief of a return from exile. Hunted through a crevasse by a masked killer but thrilled to be caught, delighted to have my heart extruded by Azrael himself. Oh no. No, no, no.

Wait, yes. Now that I’ve recognized him, now that there is no going back, I am no longer capable of treading carefully. I stare like a freak. I take him in like a long drink of saltwater. The feeling trickles in, brines my organs. Jar burial, early formaldehyde. Later, I will retch like I am dying on the floor of the ruined temple. I can tell from how his fingers move that the frosted glass between his hands is lightly wet. Gentle, transparent petals of touch left behind. He doesn’t have a buzzcut anymore. The hair curls at the nape of his neck. Pinkish tan line just under his collar. Vines on the wrought-iron balustrade. Imagining myself in Romeo’s green tights, that I were a glove on that neck, that I could announce my desire in dramatic pentameter. Outrageous. At this slanted angle, his eyes are to me seeds of wheat, cast over the watery delta. Sleepy eyes, but secretly alert, cat-like, as yellow as I remember, trained on the amber grain of the table. He hasn’t noticed me. A disappointment, sure, but also a major mercy. I don’t know what I would do if he was looking at me. I used his name as my email password for ten years and had a panic attack every time I entered it in.

Everything about me is wound so tight, so suddenly. Coiled, forced, rewired by a map of undercover copper that has chosen this moment to activate, to hobble and kidnap the dreams of my life, my presence of mind. But then again, did I ever have dreams, before this? Did I ever have a mind? I am clenching my fists, the muscles in my thighs, the teeth in my mouth. Iron on my gumline. Stick me hard and I’ll drain out, obediently. A pewter tub of pus, marrow and love. Frantic, supercharged. Every cell ripening to burst. Every bone, a gold-handled steak knife, pointed in one direction. No, a crowd of tuning forks, all vibrating in one low voice. Threaten to play my chords in your order and I’ll cry out, no hesitation. Ouch. The cardinal I have raised from infancy is pecking at my breast, flighty even in the feeding, and, unsatisfied, he takes bloodied wing. I am mortified to think of the expression on my face and the injuries it communicates. Both those I feel and those I could rise to inflict.

I meet the bartender’s eyes. He smiles knowingly, with such infinite pity that I could kill him. I have to choke down the urge to go up and admit everything to him, my plainclothes confessor. Everything that was dead is alive, and I am seeing symbols everywhere, I’d say. You only just got here, idiot, he’d reply. What is with your generation’s obsession with symbols? Blue heart, red shirt. Chapped lips, drilled lock. Silver cross and my shattered faith not only reformed but taken to an unnatural extreme. Makes me want to drive along the rocky coast for forty hours, at careless speed. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. I don’t even know where the brake pedal is. But isn’t that obvious? Just you wait until I break apart and all my diamonds are cast on the waters. Maybe I am a masochist after all. My hand was once his hand underneath the sheets. You have no idea what I imagined by the crush of blue and scarlet moonlight. The pure excess of fantasy that began as smoke but that solidified, perversely, finally taking real, wriggling, pained shape. Lost media, in the broken vein of scrolls dug out of the black, salty sediment of a coastal cave. I park at the shoulder and begin to dig. I believe, not that it happened, but that it will. That it lies waiting. A vividness of amphibian life—half-passion, half-punishment—that I cannot locate in the fossil record, no matter how I dig through sable sands, so I defer instead, trowel falling from my hands as I get to my knees, to the ultimate paleness of the sky. Do the clouds accept my prayer, do they reclothe into omens? You have no idea how stupid I could be just to belong to someone who doesn’t want me, and never did.

It’s happening now, in real-time. My heart is pulp, is polymer in a press. I am watching him stand to leave. Palm on the grimy surface. Wrist flexing as he turns. He is going to face me. He is going to see that I am there, that I am older and less pretty. One rotation of the violet planet. The jaundiced satellite, trembling in orbit. My vision goes dark. They say passion is red but really, it’s the darkest black imaginable, once you’ve fallen into its hole. The ritual starts. Justify that trance. The puddled candles, the discarded pilgrim’s shawl, the succubus summoned for romantic counsel. You serious, girl? Do you not see you will be punished for this willingness to believe? But I am already rationalizing the way I anchored myself to the flood of ichor, to the bridge over the abyss. Obsessing over fragments in the dust. Puzzle of bones, maze of desire. Chanting poorly from haunted gospel. Seek his permission, you, the independent woman. Betray your code, you, the rational actor. Offer your flesh like a tray of deli meat. A grade-A calf, fuzzy ears clipped. The succubus, sitting on the bar, sharpening her horns with a nail file, looks at me with contempt. Nothing in the world could stop me now. Scratch out the compass rose over your heart. Bloody, festering mark. Repress and then explode. Don’t say yes, and don’t say no.

Don’t you know it’s a privilege to be loved by me? So why don’t you act like it? God damn it, why don’t you act like it?

Checking out of the Moonlight Hotel in the hour before dawn, the concierge gives me a long look. I’ve realized too late that he can read my ego like a neon marquee. From the tall windows, I see the wide-eyed cars, the garnet tadpoles, the school of mackerel pass by. They are at a loss for words and so scream into the light instead.

The last great story

I stop, mid-walk, to watch a king preside over a flower. I get close enough, breath held, to examine his tightly wound, shiny, hairy face. The proboscis dangles, then descends. It hovers, then it lunges, needling the center of the flower, with less precision and much more urgent confusion than I had imagined. Is the terror I see only my projection? A tear in that wobbly eye, but would a butterfly cry? For the first time, I understand clearly that feeding is fighting. I need you to eat, the wings beat out in frantic code. Orange flower, October late-comer, your petals are limp, your nectar thin and insipid, but I need you. I need you to live.

On my way to practice, in the tunnel under the road, I spot Menelaus again, wings splayed permanently, in a cobweb. The next day, I see three of him, lined up in a neat row in the gutter. I stare a long while, though I have a place to be, to keep this picture in my mind. In the darkroom of my brain, I slowly immerse his body in fixing liquid. Gloved hands, itchy in latex. Upside-down butterfly, crushed against the wings of my corneas and then the web of my cortex. I’ll keep you perfectly preserved, I promise. I’m loyal like that. I mate for life.

Flashing from the traffic lights, cracks in the pavement along the sewer. I take fistfuls of the grillpill. I salt the meat of my soul. I grow muscle. I stop reading books. I gag when I hear the news. I choke down the memories. The cypresses on the horizon are black triangles against the red sunset. I stare at them until it feels like my head is on fire. My arms drip candlewax like an ancient saint. I ache like a mistake.

Ah, if I were a holy saint, I’d wear a gold hair net and deliver cynical blessings. My color palette would be stone gray, slate blue, clay red, piss yellow. Take heart, I’d say, bending over a broken woman, you will never be a mother. Your body will nourish no life but your own. Take heart, I’d whisper to my ancestor, you will never be a father. No son of yours will ever disgrace the Earth. Not a holy saint, then, but a holy fool.

Take this key, open that door. You were better than expected, but not the best, not the brightest, and you never were.

Of course I tolerate ambiguity, of course I’ll campaign for nuance, but the way you hold contradictory thoughts in your mind and pretend they’re both true is a coping strategy. Just admit you have no courage. Just say you can’t decide and want to leave an opening for plausible deniability. I’d take you back, then. Honesty really gets me going. Just say you will hold back on the decision until the collective tells you what to believe, you jackal of the city. Once the banners go up, only then will you know what you believe, and you will claim to have always believed it. Turn to me and say I don’t know, and I don’t care, I just need to feed. You and me both, sinner.