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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. 
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