Sleep-less, night-less

Enne Kim, Canada

To the alchemists and
their bitter weaponry, know that
sleep is unnatural for those who pray.

My mother powdered yellow, ashes gray
her hallowed grounds taste
like metal crumpets as I sift through
my dreams. Which one to displace
without intention, without grief? My
fingers lace through the illegal infinity
of thinking, sun-less.

They shroud their crucibles for the name of
magicking, and they shroud their ears for the name of
joy, and they shroud their temples for the name of
liberty. May it ring from every hill, may it die on
every time-stained porch.

They are called saboteurs;
not for innocence, but for the guilt they charred
life left behind. They have stolen
their people’s acacia eyes. They have torn
the sanctity of sleep. They have scorched
their pots of waxen gold to usher away
the yellow sun.

For the name of justice
they practice their alchemy
until it bleeds the whitewashed walls
and syncopates every valley of ashes
for the name of justice.

They stir in the lungs of defeated war
and ask for nations to breathe.
They wonder why alchemy is forbidden,
why you believe in transcendence and not transformation.
They forget to grieve over what they have drowned
in the abyss of their drained pot.

And on the river bank, drowsy, defunct,
I crawl. Coppery sleep entangles me
further into the graveyard of flowers,
where the alchemists have placed ripe peonies
over their collateral beauty.

A word for the humble

Tremble! recede! they ask for those
with quiet hearts to give up their skylines
and rope in their suns and hide their
flaxen eyes. they ask for the lambs to slaughter
the ram, they ask for the ram to devour the bird,
they ask for the bird to crouch in the wood. and the
wood they have painted white with stolen hoar. they with
the starving feet ride the seven seas. they ask
for the natives’ astronomy to prepare
for the migrants’ day of judgment. that they may
juxtapose their plunder with the crumble of
their rhombic pyramids. for even the
giants made of stone will lie restless in their tombs and cease
their gilded genocide. let the humble learn
to linger. to rejoice in the aftermath
of the baron’s blemish. to burn nature’s avarice, the human hunger
for spoiled earthenware. to let the shofars accompany
the sound of your (un)shackled lungs.

The shape of cold

Oil latches onto my yellow pink
tongue and pours down into the
labyrinth named esophagus and lords
over escaping reverberations so that
I bite my browning teeth and close my
ruddy eyes. Tears leak into the oil’s territory
and it clenches the wheel ever tighter. “Please
do not disturb my work.” As it whispers I rub
my jaw and rock it awake until the oil hits my throat
and deescalates liberation. “Please don’t draw
attention to your acquired apprehension.” Oil can be
satirical, alliterative. But my fingers slip too easily to
catch its leash and I stumble over what is not meant
to be left unsaid. The oil crawls in its fossilized fatigue
into the chambers where I attempt to
vocalize retreat. “Just stay.” It croons. “Just stay
unkempt in disbelief and let the world kiss your
feet. See? When your fears are said in rhythm, all your
mislayed mornings are covered in the oil that
makes you clean and pure and eager for a silent verse.”


the cornucopia of desire

In Georgia, we mourn the scarlet lines of our
pepper plants, the kkaennip leaves with their veins of skin, the
leather of judicious lies crafted by the grandmothers
who have no joys left to sow. For two hundred years,
it is they who defended the spasmodic suffering of Seoul,
they who demurred distended with disgrace, they who bowed before
the green vivacity of wisdom, justice, moderation. After whipping
their daughters and bereaving their sons, the grandmothers discover
the graves where white peaches scatter are not so tender after all.
The ripe pear juice of the listless valley drips down from
their finite loves and infinite picking. They who
forget the American pride and become
the yellow(ing) slave. They recede without departing
the humility- humidity- of a sun-scoured land, where plasticity
becomes one with concrete gardens. They long for the sticky grapes and
the soft cabbage and the stinging pickled radish, foreign to this
overgrown plantation, foreign to their lonesome gray
spades. Foreign to their granddaughters
who cry blue raspberry tears and forget
they are the culmination of rebellions lost and yearning won.

Enne is Korean-American and loves publishing works in youth-based magazines, primarily because she also runs one. She enjoys reading long books and drinking big cups of green tea.