Changing Room
It middles through an hourglass,
tumbling among itself
even as it tumbles through air:
umbilicus of hair.
The tropics of keffiyeh
nourish a darkness shining through.
This ordinary ceremony of undoing
that my eyes make new.
Muslim girls will uncover their faces
before they uncover their hair.
Else, we’d be lost forever;
their curls suggest far too many places.
It wraps in zeros overlapping;
infinity smashed against his head.
Domingo
Sunday is walking a friend
to the shore, the hiss of hangover
attending us. He asks which island
is there but hell if I know.
Sunday is scrubbing the char
off the grill; is making old things
almost new again. The coal
crumbles into a riverbed.
Watching a man fish,
watching him whip and winch
and wait out the wildness
that office work brings.
At almost night, we gather
to capture the weird purple god
sitting in the West. Strangers
know beauty when we see it.
Staten Island burnishes like Troy
or the truth and promise in myth
or the fingertip, full-moon shaped,
of a girl I’ve yet to kiss.
Naked Except for her Heart
Inside a corrugated box that once contained
a classroom set of Math is a Journey! there is:
a spitball bazooka made from straws and Scotch tape
and really strong lungs, someone’s grandmother’s cross
strung through a part of paracord, a handball
whose Sky Bounce logo has been long lost,
a figure of Chris Benoit, the Rabid Wolverine,
his kung fu grip, who developed dementia
and strangled his wife and his boy and himself,
an issue of Maxim from June with Jenna Jameson
all naked except for her heart breaker tattoo
and a fireman’s hat on the cover, its paper soft
like a torah from being folded and guarded, folded
and guarded, and chocolate in thin tin foil
painted to look like monsters.
Mechanical Turk
A chessboard perpetrates a real bodied war,
threats of push and pull.
Beneath the checkered semaphores,
a confidence man novelizes it all.
Within him, diametric muscles
bubble and repulse
to flex a thumb, tic a lip.
The sinews are brilliant
draped in myelin,
a fasces of mica.
For a Moment
There are days at my desk
when everything is articulated neatly
patient in its own plot of table top.
Black pens, an open faced journal,
his grandmother’s ring.
I’m supposed to take them up,
these things, and create
something larger than myself
like art or an act
of love. Instead, it’s
digging through a shallow mountain
for a photo of someone else –
Poetry was someone. Marriage,
someone else. Even breakfast
needs my hands to make it.
BaekJul BulGul (Indomitable Spirit) original draft
At least we have the dirt. We could
ball it together like table
crumbs and hold it under our tongues
until the soil separates
from the ore of KeumGang San. That way
we’d coat our throats in diamond dust.
They stopped teaching Korean in
Korean schools today. Something
as simple as annyoung
haseyo said in the hallways can
earn a demerit. They’re holding
red pens against our children’s throats
and it’s as good as their bayonets.
When Yeong-Sun calls me otochan
I want to smack her in her mouth
so hard she spits out blood hotter
than the rising sun, or feed her strips
of kimchi one by one. The sour
will preserve her dying Choson tongue.
The missioners taught us metaphor.
Their pahng was so tough it may as well
have been flesh, won’t melt like bahp. No –
When they taught us how HaNaNim said, Let
there be bit but we were still sitting in
the dark, windows boarded against
the street, well, that was metaphor.
God ga ra sa dae light i ssue ra.
Our throats grew warm with the words we’ve saved
since morning, since our daughters were born
into this. I swear Yeong-Sun looks like
a yudeung or a lighthouse when she
recites any passage in Korean.
Sometimes, after prayer, they ask us
what we believed before we knew Christ.
Their voices are soft so we could tell
they’re being polite, won’t turn around
and burn our books on Palgwe or Taeguk.
But still, we’re tired of philosophy
and reasoning. We start to sing:
Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo,
Arirang gogaero neomeoganda.
Nareul beorigo gasineun nimeun
simnido motgaseo balbyeongnanda.
There’s silence. We’re all closed eyes, living
in our own Koreas. Someone brave
opens his eyes first; someone braver
says this dirt will never be enough.
Grace
When Ali made the shuffle step, he made grace.
When Jimi played Woodstock, he outplayed grace.
The elm in the backyard has started to change.
That color of last summer is a stayed grace.
I wasn’t born with the best of eyes.
Each distant light bends with a grass blade’s grace.
She would defend any Slavic novelist.
Her booty shake is her only paid grace.
God has given you another mouth to feed.
Believe his speech is just a delayed grace.
Who Dreams
Pop trash media preaches
a man is measured in cash.
The boys at recess preached
a man is strong, runs fast.
The red states preach
a man shoots first.
The preacher preaches
a man thinks of himself last.
Biology preaches
a man is only half.
Dad preaches
a man who dreams is a waste.
A man is whatever I
am.
My Calling
“you lie,” he cried
and ran on.
–Stephen Crane
It’s the knowing that kills me
not the knowledge I seek
or the chase of distant things
like mountain peaks.
Journey is unavoidable
in lives like these.
We count the nights
like treasure among thieves.
I can tell already
it won’t be enough. I know
my own strength, my own reach.
I won’t survive
even as an inkling.
If I aim too high
at least I’ll be called
a dreamer.
7 Mutations of Jon Chin
1.
My bones remember yesterday.
They burn in their softened state.
The memory of muscles so perfect
that this is a passive act in learning.
The skeleton does all the work;
it even self corrects, heals over
stronger where it’s done been cracked.
My mind is lost to possibilities
(poet, programmer, president?)
while the skull whispers to itself
protect, protect, protect.
2.
When I could wrap my whole hand
around the 1st bone in his thumb
Dad said I still had a long way to go.
He had too much faith in the act
of growing, understood this only
as a journey of height, that when I
was tall enough to look him in the eye
that I’d have the same depth of character
he had. No.
3.
and God, I miss my ex. The space
between her hips could fit
a universe atomic terrific.
To be defined by what
your body lacks, a void
you’re meant to fill, to grow.
She told me once, after a night
of non conceiving,
that women’s veins were closer to the skin,
that all my girlfriend’s hands will be cold.
4.
Isn’t this just sitting in ash,
praying for rain, waiting for the sun
again and again and again?
I subscribe to a biological god,
the 1 who gives my cells their names,
who draws the bones their road maps.
5.
Why do firetrucks
bolt through the streets
on rainy days, their red
and white sirens ablaze?
Won’t the clouds throw down
their whole weight and melt that care away?
6.
I would sit on my hands
until they disappeared
then study the dead weight.
Shoulder, elbow, and wrist,
this chain of evidence
promised something existed there.
Then the blood would flow back
1st gently like a candle
then searing like needles,
the pain of remembering.
7.
This is to forget and be forgotten.
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