Guerrilla
YEJIN SUH
|
Each cut: a strategic battleground placement. Trenches
in the war. Burrowed and deep, one after another-- this one dedicated to myself, this one to her, this one to the strange and terrible shapes that battered within me, fingers pressing out from inside my body, purpling. This one nicked recklessly in the first wave and this one carved painstakingly over miles and miles of stalemated time: hunched over in the bathroom sink, a body so disgustingly unmarred, a smooth expanse of skin waiting for war. Blood bubbling in tender formation. I told her it was a rite of passage, that she might’ve done it too, once, when she was young, or at least cradled the thought in her head. I interrogated myself over and over again on sanguinary doctrine. The plan: drown the enemy in crimson grooves. The plan: hurl Molotovs down the gaping line. The plan: deploy a daisy cutter to flatten forests, the arteries of oak roots and wildflowers, stinging. I can wince now at the thought of a blade ripping through me, at the burning and scabbing that followed. Back then, I never winced. Back then, I wanted to cut to the bone. |
John F Kennedy Ate My Aunt
YEJIN SUH
|
The Traveller
What is the opposite of decapitation? A truck head turning into an intersection, bodiless. My father told me, smokers are the worst types of addicts. They drain and suck until their bone-dry lips shrivel to nothing, shrivel to certain pieces, star bits and acrid crumbles. Behind my eyelids unfurls white vapor escaping his lips in morsels of soft smoke conjunction. I watched him through the Belt of Venus between my shutter blinds, half-way closed, slicing in alternating shades of white. I couldn’t see his face. I remember learning grief in five stages, which stumps me since people have died for grief, fought brothers and sisters, tore raw screams for it, spiraled long novels in search of it, made love, tasted metallic against their teeth, cut hair, whored themselves out, meditated, dipped in cold wonderlands. If in five stages I remain at the inception of the first. To blink enough times is to pay homage to a fleeting world. John F Kennedy Ate My Aunt "The first definite formulation of a theory is found in the Timaeus of Plato (4th cent. B.C.)… It is the idea of finding in the structure of the universe a 'harmony' which is as wonderful as the harmony which can be discovered in the musical tone relations that appealed to the serious thinkers. An understanding of musical harmony will make universal harmony intelligible…"
—Kinkeldey, Otto. “The Music of the Spheres.” Musica universalis is the Music of the Spheres,
the religiosity of Ancient Greek scholars towards the dance of celestial bodies overlapping, echoing, spinning music, a concentric clockwork of proportion too divine for human ears. When I listen closely I can never hear it, but I can hear stellar revels, an Earth’s sorrows, lost things. I confess to watching a single burgeoning star in the sky and accepting its fate. I confess to losing parts of my body in hungry travelers’ nooks, airports. I remember my father a digit splayed across the intersection where we parted ways, his polo like crimson crumbling under my fingers, his thousands of eyes, pincers like saws. His flesh near mine but already a decrepit ghost lingering within old photographs. This quiet melody halted when he cleared the gate: Boarding flight number zero seven three octaves is there a resonance for indefinite loss? A code? If I had looked more closely, pressed my ear upon it, might I have cracked it? Beat at it with all the vigor of a wartime cryptanalyst matching letter to number to note, barricaded beyond reasoning and resistance? I couldn’t look him in the eyes, not until I knew the signs or the motions to keep someone in a static breadth of land, to say one thing and mean another. I’ll see you in Paris, he said, in London, up the Oratory. Years and years later. We’ll meet as strangers, inconspicuous, humdrum visitors, back to back aside the Mona Lisa, on opposite sides of a park bench. Like the movies, except we won’t be listening for a key to save the world, just each other. A cipher simpler than Morse and more grueling than Voynich to unravel is the beating of a human heart to another that hums a chord of its own, silent to everyone but the closest. Now I can barely remember if it was substitution or transposition, in his language or mine, polyalphabetic or mono. I lost the exacts, but a human head can save a tune for centuries: LaGuardia consumed my father. John F Kennedy ate my aunt. Newark Liberty swallowed my grandmother whole and I lost them to white forsythia and volcanic islands ringing the Yellow Sea. I wait for them to signal me, though their lights dim across oceans. I know when my father knocks back a constellation or two to intoxicating night air, he is drunk on galaxies on the other side of the world. But I think in the quiet of my nights and his early dawns, we pause for poetic order-- We hear the Music of the Spheres. |
Yejin Suh is a high-school writer from New Jersey whose work has been recognized by the Scholastic Awards and Princeton University. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit, Prometheus Dreaming, and Parallax, among other publications.