The easy way out

In Eulji-ro, on a purple winter evening, my mouth full of baozi, my mind full of the New World, I hear a girl say, plainly: My mother is always negative and my father, passive-aggressive. I chug water from a tiny paper cup as she continues: We’re all afraid of him. My chair is turned away from her, so I try to conjure her face in my mind. All I see is orange neon, the snot on my jacket sleeves. I burn my tongue on a mouthful of patty.

“Now that we can do anything, what we will do?” I read aloud from the back blurb of a book on modern design. “Nothing,” Strawberry replies immediately, in his frank, declarative way, and in the skinny aisle of a half-abandoned bookstore, under awkwardly bright lights, I cackle with derisive joy. Judgment is the only way to survive judgment. I can’t explain how truly painful I find all of this.

The punch is not the punch. The blow from the left is in the pull of the right. The kiss is before the touch. Do you see what I mean? It’s all in the set-up. The brain is a blade and I whet it on blood, saliva, whey protein milkshakes. I talk in circles, in squares, in pentagrams, and in all kinds of perimetered gardens. I am directing a movie in my mind and I keep my lead actor at arm’s length.

The lever of my life casts no shadow. Here, the Martyr said: How to love is how to react. Walking back to the business hotel from the restaurant, I read the plaque and wonder at the aftertaste of history. The eve of war over a basket of hamburger and fries. Guessing at motive by reading lips. All my affection, attention, intention, reduced and evaporated into a chunky, failed sauce.

Eat with your eyes

Eat with your eyes, shit with your hands, love with your phone. Sleep when you’re dead, die when you’re young, dream of things beyond heaven and hell. Devour your son, Horatio. Your body wants no legacy.

Returning home at night after dinner to find that you, my old familiar, have been here. You have left marks on my door and tablecloth. I make my way through the house, trembling all the while. Trilogy of similar sensation—fear, exhilaration, derealization—playing up my calf and thigh as I enter a parade of dark rooms and reach for the light.

Double date with my double life. She sits across the table, straw idling in her mayonnaise and moonlight-filled mouth, and stares with no expression as I double down on every feeling I have ever had. She pours the cherry wine and knows better than to interrupt her enemy. In the blush of oncoming night, every person in this restaurant is a predator. The wallpaper is speckled like a fish. Decorative plates—streaks of sardines in a circlet—hang from crooked nails. She is better-read, better-informed than I am, and yet still cooler of mind. The influx of information has not poisoned her as it has me. Bitterly, I make excuses. I smile weakly and rage. How dare she be hard on me, but easy on everyone else?

Delicate, pearlescent obsession, in a choker around my ankle. Insecurity like corseted diamonds, catching the red light. Runes carved on a radish that I pick up and fling against the wall. Pacing the cell, remembering the pink, orange, yellow, blue wildflowers in the photo. The horses, unrestrained. The window, above my head. Will I have the courage to place a bet on myself? Oh but, old familiar, I am afraid. If only we could speak, but then again, you never spoke. All your presence did was remind me that I feel better alone. Oh, but still I wish I had a friend who felt as good as a rhyme. I wish I could be as good to a friend as I am bad to the mountain range. If I cannot find or summon her, I’ll have to make her from shoestrings of flesh, like a magician. I’ll have to summit the peak with her limp frame on my back, through razors of cloud and then—?

Guesswork, linework, overwork. Work, then play. Playground, plaything, wordplay, foreplay. Sardines in a bucket. In a what? Bloodstream, bloodline, blood sport. Sporting wounds like a badge of honor, then honoring the bad twice as much as the good. We’re attracted to power, you see, but try again, appeal to my good nature. My what? Do the deed, then ditch the girl. Burnt brown sugar on the breeze in the pink evening. Chew on the end of a candy cigarette, not for the pleasure, but for the love of the game. Back in the restaurant, my double, surrounded by carnivores, confesses to a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. How painful to feel my envy, so much stronger than my compassion, rear its head, rejoice. Back in the house, turning the lights on in the workshop to find that the jug in the center of the kiln has turned back to clay.

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.