Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. I check my body for damage but other than the rift in my chest, from which every piece of broken silver has already been plundered, I am disturbingly whole.
To be uninjured is such a disappointment. I’d love to lift my arm up and show you all the blood gushing from me. Geyser from the armpit, lava lacquering the snow fields and olive trees of Mount Olympus, sticky plasma gunking my hair, clogging the joints, flooding the mechanism. Alkaline red pooling at my feet until I am bled dry. Maybe then I could stop trying to prove how much I am trying.
The heat, an intrusion. I am afraid by what’s in front of and behind me, so I look up. Green and aquamarine, blessing of a breeze and call of the cicada on the staggered stone steps. I imagine turning on a dime, splitting from the group, sprinting out of the parking lot, my plastic flip-flops loud on the hot asphalt. I imagine disappearing into the siege of the trees. What version of me, what story of mine would follow me over that line?
The nighttime, a sweetness. After the typhoon, the evening clouds are pink and black. Store-bought fireworks by the seaside. The dark sand, grit in my underwear. The moss on the cypress saying a prayer and the waves joining in. I wait by the pillar and, though I have never had faith, I look down to find that I am pressing my hands together. As the air trembles and cools, I watch the shadows race one another across the upper floor. Horrifyingly, I reexamine my hands to find that the little courage I first mustered has grown by itself into a bonfire. What am I supposed to do with all this new bravery? Where do I put it?
When the light moves, I don’t see where it goes. Alvin comes out and asks me what I’m doing and dumbly I say, “I wanted to see the sky.” Later I realize that though this was not the truth, it was no lie.
Sitting in rows to eat. Eye contact from across the room. Riding the bus down the bridge that spans the bay. So steep, it’s like flying. Water like a sheet of pressed steel. Hammer me down so I remember who I am, so I can stop this longing for a place I have never been. From the window, mountains, denuded. Sweat on me as though I were clothed in it. Sparring is a relationship and I get dumped each time. Every breath, a live wire. Every look, a cardinal direction and I follow it obediently until I am knee-deep in endless salt flats. I don’t think. Me, not think? But I have never been more myself. A beckoning hand and I die inside. But I go down with no bitterness. Every single soft spot is dear to me now. Where is that girl who nursed every cut so vindictively, who held every grudge against her chest like a phantom limb, like Kali chucking her skulls with four arms? Has it always been so easy for her to step aside?
Clear your mind like a rag over a blackboard. Stand in stance. Power through. Hit hard. Head swims. Briefly, I meet God at the meat market and tell him it hurts to breathe. He is unimpressed, but I hardly expected or wanted more. Fish in a net. Fluid blister on my foot. Blood on my gloves, from a wound no one can see. From the open doorway, a butterfly and then a crow. Aim true. Clear your mind. Close the distance.
I thought you should know that the ice in the set of your frame has the tightest possible grip on me. It wakes me like a thump in the night. It pushes me to a place beyond the orange-barked cedars. When the ice returns home, like a green-scaled salmon upriver, to the delta of your jaw, it fists the moonlight in me and cracks it hard, robin’s-egg blue. It melts me down to the clay.
Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. Where’d that come from? You won’t hold my hands so, when you tell me, meet my eyes instead. Where’d that come from?
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