this room will still exist
|
In the beginning,
a field broke grass from dark earth & fertilizer, but crops would not grow. City crept closer. Before you & I were born, our hearts were ripe fruit dangling in a lonely woman’s backyard. ▪ 94 years ago, a stranger slept with the window open. Fog surged into his room. Imagine waking from a dream of sky to sky. ▪ Tonight, your face vanished from my mind’s unending mirror. A blue sadness replaced it. A sound not of your voice, not your laughter, but the wild echo of a gunshot. I strike my dresser’s mirror, break off a shard the size of your head. ▪ There are 86 kinds of sadnesses in this room alone. I’ve counted each of them: the long serpent standing upright to the height of the ceiling, the warm bear skulking the corner, his fur matted in dust. I’ve grown a blue mantis the size of my hands. I’ve fed it copper & hyacinth. & often, the black caracara locked in the closet ululates at night. ▪ I’ll carry the nightstand, carry the bed & the desk, the lamp & the moth circling the lamp to a new room in a new country. I’ll wear a different tongue. I’ll lacquer the moon. I’ll build a bookshelf from the bark of a dead tree. I’ll kiss a man. I’ll kiss a man. I’ll kiss & ask the moon: when did my brother become myth? His face a brown blotch in my dreams. His skin particles floating in the sunlight. ▪ Some dull hour in the future this alcove will be emptied of sound. In a steel table, in a changing city, my humbled body will open for the last time at the hands of a stranger. I’ll love them for this final act of surrender. For the kind stitch & staple, & later, these walls will hold in them the hum of two lovers, which is to say two men, or two women burrowing into each other’s breath. |
|
Note: The title is borrowed from a line in Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York (2008).
Aldo Amparán is a queer, Latinx poet from the border cities of El Paso, TX, & Ciudad Juárez, CHIH, MX. He is a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow & finalist for the Alice James Award. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, & elsewhere. Find him online at http://aldoamparan.com or on Twitter: @skygoneout.
Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. She is currently a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and an art director at Guernica. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the Knockdown Center, RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1, and in publications including Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and The Guardian.