Stigmata
I drank
the radioactive
spillover from
the walls of your
tin can house
as if it would
make me a man.
Instead,
I learned to cry
in a gender
no one’s ever
heard of before.
School taught me
to reduce language down
to its elementary particles:
quarks and photons,
verbs and pronouns.
To recognize
Dante’s hell
as a frozen wasteland
of our own making.
The wiki asks
if i’m ready
to understand
cosmic abundance.
I reply
If everything is strings
then sewing is
the closest we’ll get
to being God.
Why else would
they call my
top surgery
stitches heresy?
Over time the
scars saturate
bruising their way
across my chest
in twin slices of
heaven, one hand
outstretched
to another,
an imitated creation,
this epitomal ecstasy,
this lucent
stigmata-blossom,
born from the wound
where I ripped
Adam’s rib from
my own and
I was happy.
Maybe euphoria’s
just heresy
by another
name, but what
do I know?
I never figured I would
make it through
a poem without
apologizing.
For the record
I did try to become
something other
than myself. But
I couldn’t
take another day
holding my body at
an arms length.
If the space
between my electrons
and nucleus is
mostly void,
maybe I could disappear
without a trace,
is what I would say
if I was eleven again.
But I’m nearing
twenty now
and it’s time I stop
playing at being
a philosopher.
Yes, I stumbled blind
into man-made rapture,
but what do I
do with it?
I was an angel
until I found out
it paid minimum wage;
I couldn’t hold on
for too long
before getting
a desk job.
The sun’s all
tangled up
in my chest;
a star reborn
into streetlamp light.
Time makes strange
edges of my
indelible form,
and I am not
convinced I can
do this forever.
It’s not enough
to be set loose in
a world full
of walls. But
to spend the
night in a
hospital bed
and finally sleep.
To fall from
Eden
and
be
all
the
better
for
it.
Hey
I could do about anything, even the dishes
or your mounds of laundry
like great haystacks within which
I am searching for evidence of your life.
How can you inhabit a room
in your breathing breaking light body
and yet I’m still searching
for signs of you?
I, the modern day archeologist.
You who have gifted me a bounty
of new habits and hobbies:
Pulling the unwilling strands of
greasy hair into an unfinished knot
to coax you into the shower if only
to wash your body, my inadequate
washcloth and all
the water running red.
Those intangible seams
that I can’t figure out how to press back
into your wrists.
And maybe we haven’t exchanged
words in a few days
and my mornings consist of finding
all the sharp objects
to hide in the upper quadrants of my closet,
and my afternoons of following
your rotation
around the house – bed, table
tablet, sofa – and then
the occasional venture into the backyard,
and my evenings seeing
your face
in the bottom of my tea leaves,
as if I could taste
your sorrow like an
artificial melatonin and
fall asleep drunk on it.
Where are you?
How much longer can we keep
this up – I miss you?
Hey (I say in a whisper)
Can I get you something to eat?
Where we exit the world and your eyes are empty
Hey, can you look at me?
and I reach back through time
We need to get you out of the house.
to grab you before you disappear,
Can you hear me?
and make it all go away
I need you to take your medicine.
with my naive idealistic hope,
Hey…
and I’m so scared.
I say “hey” enough that it becomes
its own kind of prayer.
I apologize for it all
as I’m unable to greet you in your grief.
I find another pair of kid’s scissors
and throw them in the closet.
Hey–
American Poet On A Losing Streak
Think of the simulated
chill against your cheekbones
and remind me why
we decided to be born again?
The night sky by your house
is only open on off days so
I guess we’ll have to wait
for the real thing to decide if
it was all worth it. Somehow I
waited long enough to win
on a losing streak. Which is to say
American placed the gun in my mouth
but decided not to pull it.
Because I’ve forgotten how to
sleep at night. Because I’d rather
try on your masculinity, than artificially
engineer my own. A thick woolen
coat of simulacrum coaxing me
to stay a great deal. We visit
each other yesterday.
But why aren’t you laughing?
No really, what is so funny
that it can’t be extracted from your lips
and discarded. I know
you placed your eggshell self and
balanced it against the rising tides, no
not the sea kind the
solar winds! You’d know
if only it was tomorrow already
but I digress (I am always digressing).
Do you think I’ll need to ask
for permission when my girlhood
widens so much as to become
a container? My airtight body into
its plexiglass walls and pretend I know
how to know how I became the way I am.
Sometimes I lay my body over
the radiator just to remember.
Sometimes I like to think
I would have become a poet
if I hadn’t become my country instead.
Levi Kim (he/him) is a queer poet and writer from the Bay Area, California, currently studying literary arts and political science at Brown University. His work investigates the intermingling of the queer body with the ecological world–and how we can reimagine our human impact as interactive rather than extractive. His publications include the creative nonfiction essay “My Mother; Her Mother; the Cicada” in VISIONS AAPI Magazine. When he’s not searching for another tree or fire escape to write in, he can be found sewing clothes and creative hyperspecific zines.
