Allow me,

allow me the comfort of your back.

Let me take away parts of you—collarbones

Adam’s apples, Adam’s ribs

your eye lashes, your clumsy hands

the Andy Warhol tattoo

the quarter moons in the corner of your mouth.

Let me wrap my legs around your thighs.



Let me map your skin in my head,

measuring your spine thumb

by thumb.

Here are your ears and here is your tongue.

I am marking latitudes

and longitudes of you if only to remember

because I swear to God you kissed my knee

the morning after.

You might have said something and I didn’t catch it

but then it may have been only God

who, with final judgment, uttered, “No.”

So here we are—



in different elongated-shaped places on the map:

I, barely visible in a simple province;

you, in a foreign country

with vegan restaurants and underground trains.

懐かし〜, this is how little children would call it.



This piece (along with two others) was...

i.

see how the world

is made pleasant.

the greens are deeper;

the browns, darker.

there is a white light,

a gleam different

from the sun

and

surrounding it is a quiet,

a particular quiet

that deserves a name

of its own.

ii.

this is how

we become deaf.

let me tell you

that it is not the rain

that washes the earth

but the sound

that drowns our ears.

we are filled

and then drained;

full and then emptied.

we are made to feel

so much only to be

take away.

so this is a gift,

this remnant of an

impact, of sensation.

this quiet is a gift.

This piece, along with some of my photographs, were featured on Homework Magazine.

I.

The last time i saw myself

was at the bottom of a cup

reflected in red porcelain,

and the last time i tried to remember,

I was peering through a hole,

a cut-out void.

The last time it was this quiet was at 3PM

siesta—— but unlike the dawn

there were no ghosts, only children

who are no longer children,

siblings whom you share marrow and bone,

born a year after the other during the

episode of when our parents loved each other

a little more.



Now, only a little less.



The universe stretches itself into black

and space takes away what it can,

So that by some principle, we are only left

with floating unknowns.

Angry at the weight of gas upon gas

the planets creak and continue to spin.

Us, too, in our own orbits move in motion

where time does not end and nothing is last.

Rotating

bearing the weight of people

upon people upon people.

II.

The last time Jupiter fell was in a dream.



...

i was sitting outside a cafe one night

and cars were passing by at a steady stream.

i couldn’t help but stare

because the parade of blaring lights

was all too attractive. cars entering the building

would turn left by the entrance stairs while the cafe,

being directly at the front,

would always be flooded with yellow lights.

like phosphenes.

like a kaleidoscopic display.

the more i looked,

the more the feeling that i was in a dream persisted.

like all bright and blinding things

it begged you to be happy,

to look forward— here is another season, another year.

here is summer.

here is rain and june.

all that gleam was trying to push back

my frowning insides, devouring the absence of light

and forcefully filling it with light.

lightness. good news.

a message that finally something beautiful has come,

yes. i promise you this, i promise.

trance-like, i continued to stare...

(published on Thistle Magazine, Obsession issue, 2013)

He was Tiffauges, named after a terrifying, terrible thing. Then there is Abel: a hundred, a thousand times bigger than a cat; a seemingly rough but gentle character. Their story is set in Paris (“the city of let’s pretend” as the cat would call it), spun out of Yves Navarre’s inspirations and published in 1986 then later translated to English in 1992. It is written in a somewhat broken, monotonous tone to which we cannot exactly attribute to Navarre’s original writing or to poor translation but nevertheless sets the perfect voice for this narration.

Tiffauges begins with telling us that he is a cat and proceeds to reveal that at the end of this story is his death, as all great love stories end. The book is filled with many observations. He goes from an idea to the next as if running about the stairs in hurried motions. Every now...

Reading will not be good for you.

You are fickle and uncertain.

You are symbolized by an identity that is broken,

selves within selves folded into each other

like batter and eggs or blankets and skin,

leaf upon leaf. Then you have to be careful when it pours.

Rain will not be good for you. Like a trance,

you will pray, “More rain please. More.”

You will repent.



You will acknowledge the heaviness of the air

and your own hands will weigh you down.

A contamination of green.

Limp. You will have to tell people,

“I’m a Pisces.” because people are not sensitive;

people will not take the chance to know.

“I’m a Pisces.” That means you are gullible.

That means if they tell you they love you,

you will probably believe them. That sometimes

you sit very still and hug your knees and swear

that your heartbeats are almost like geological tremors.

Forceful. Purposeful.



Sometimes you...

The highway was dark

but you can tell from the rippling reflections

the movement of the sea.

The lamp lights burned like sunflowers

or little houses

and they blurred as you passed by each of them

in the infinitely long bridge.



That night, the moon was a crescent

and then it grew a quarter.

We were inching towards regions

of untouched skin, the hours crawling over

the darker parts of the city.

We were stealing whatever we could:

misplaced hands, legs,

affections, dimples the size of a penny,

wrists, the innocence and naivety.



That night the moon looked like a fish bowl,

dark and blue;

pebbles reflecting green and red.

I am reminded of the fishes at home.

First, the grey fish. Silent.

Then a pair of oranges ones and another,

a pale female.

They swam quicker: dying, death, spirits.

It meant nothing to them.

Not when the first of them floats,

not when another opens its gills too wide

...