[As is the blood]
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As is the blood
on the screen, the horror movie, when the last bug is plucked from static. The frizz still of it, small translucent wings between fingers buzzing like the film it arrived on. Hollywood horror or disaster enlivened in living rooms. The carpet was how you learned gravity, sitting so close to it when news came. Horror: the small fire stoked between the rib. Crack of bone or crunch of the smallest fly now dead, now 3-dimensional, melding its antennae back to flight. How television turned off meant bodies inched out between rooftops and rebar toward each other again. How else did you ever sleep at night, in this country, where singing meant you could not sit. Your hand tests mine tonight. Our nails are polished to a fume. I could love you like this, like how cats slink toward each other with cicadas in their throats. Pain, nothing, but cold cold snow or shitty feedback or static. Watching bigger cats in the snow. Or, was it people starving before they turn to each other. I lick my hand and reached into the popcorn, I confess. The diva screams in a lightning strike in this country where you lean forward to buzz quietly in my ear to better taste the salt. You could walk toward me with a head thick with sea hair and part of me will want this high tide and joy, but I am not done mourning yet. Or ever. My fingers pressed to the living floor, translated. What good is this bridge when it is unmoving and I never call you back, when the neighbor does not listen, the fly hatches in the last suitcase, on this other side, when I wake up this morning and every morning and there is bread. |
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Michelle Lin is a poet, activist, and author of A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press), a lyrical examination of Asian American identity, gender and daughterhood, the inheritance of stories, and survival from trauma. Her poems can be found in HEArt, Apogee, and more. Her work was showcased in Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Lo Writer of the Week” and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Public Poetry Project. She has performed for APAture, grlhood, Litquake, and more. She is a Kundiman fellow. Learn more at michellelinpoet.wordpress.com.
Magali Duzant is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her photographic work explores perceptions of light and landscape. She has exhibited widely, including at Little Berlin, Philadelphia, Queens Museum in New York City, Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Sydney College of Art in Australia. In 2015, her book, I Looked & Looked, was published by Conveyor Editions. Her work has been published in print and online most recently by Aint-Bad Magazine, Der Greif, Yet Magazine, and Reframing Photography. She holds an MFA from Parsons The New School of Design and a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University. For further information, visit www.magaliduzant.com.