Monica Youn

(she opens the door) (he is twelve inches away) her fingers still splayed across the battened-down brass latch of his sternum (she closes the door) (he is eight feet away) her palm skids down the banister clings to the fluted globe of the finial (he is twenty-eight feet away) (she opens the door) the black air is fast flowing and cold (she closes the door) she clutches her thin intimacy tight under her chin and trips down the steps (he is forty feet away) the stiff wind palpably stripping his scent from her hair from the numb fingers she raises to her mouth a cab pulls up (she opens the door) she bends the body hitherto upright (she closes the door) the cracked brown vinyl (he is ninety feet away) biting the backs of her thighs red blotches suffusing her cheeks I’m sorry please stop she says (he is four hundred feet away) please stop the cab (she opens the door) the cab stops she pushes a twenty through the slot (he is seven hundred feet away) (she closes the door) the husk of something dry and light falls to the sidewalk crumbles away (she opens the door) (he is two feet away) (she closes the door)

Waking on the train, I thought we were attacked by light: chrome-winged birds hatching from the lagoon. That first day the buoys were all that made the harbor bearable: pennies sewn into a hemline. Later I learned to live in it, to walk through the alien city— a beekeeper’s habit— with fierce light clinging to my head and hands. Treated as gently as every other guest— each house’s barbed antennae trawling for any kind of weather— still I sobbed in a glass box on an unswept street with the last few lire ticking like fleas off my phonecard I’m sorry I can’t stand this, which one of us do you love?

Angels are unthinkable in hot weather except in some tropical locales, where from time to time, the women catch one in their nets, hang it dry, and fashion it into a lantern that will burn forever on its own inexhaustible oils. But here—shins smocked with heat rash, the supersaturated air. We no longer believe in energies pure enough not to carry heat, nor in connections—the thought of someone somewhere warming the air we breathe that one degree more . . . . In a packed pub during the World Cup final, a bony redhead woman gripped my arm too hard.I could see how a bloke might fancy you. Like a child’s perfect outline in fast-melting snow, her wet handprint on my skin, disappearing. The crowd boiling over, a steam jet:Brrra-zil! And Paris—a heroin addict who put her hypodermic to my throat:Je suis malade. J’ai besoin de medicaments. Grabbing her wrist, I saw her forearm’s tight net sleeve of drying blood. I don’t like to be touched. I stand in this mammoth parking lot, car doors open, letting the air conditioner run for a while before getting in. The heat presses down equally everywhere. It wants to focus itself, to vaporize something instantaneously, efficiently—that shopping cart, maybe, or that half-crushed brown-glass bottle— but can’t quite. Asphalt softens in the sun. Nothing’s detachable. The silvery zigzag line stitching the tarmac to the sky around the edges is no breeze, just a trick of heat. My splayed-out compact car half-sunk in the tar pit of its own shadow— strong-shouldered, straining to lift its vestigial wings.

A gauze bandage wraps the land and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates. A series of slaps molds a mountain, a fear uncoils itself, testing its long cool limbs. A passing cloud seizes up like a carburetor and falls to earth, lies broken- backed and lidless in the scree. Acetylene torches now snug in their holsters, shop-vacs trundled back behind the dawn. A mist becomes a murmur, becomes a moan deepening the dust- choked fissures in the rock O pity us Ignatz O come to us by moonlight O arch your speckled body over the earth.

Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life. There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners. She thought to brush her hand against his thigh. She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail. The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to become a kind of grammar. She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as they drowned. Soot amassed in drifts in the corners of the room. She pressed her thumb into the hollow of his throat for a while and then let him go.

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by a razor.Chug say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam.Chug chug say the piston-powered ground squirrels. The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin is much dented by little winds. The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces. Here is the door he will paint on the rock. Here is the glass floor of the cliff. He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.

Take any desired height, or place points for top of head and heels. Divide into eights. . . . 8.  Head tilted back between the headboard slats. Eyes glass boxes filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue-gray, the color of good government. 7.  Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity. a.  As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to leach the arsenic out of the light. b.  “And then I buried it.” “Where, exactly? And when?” “In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You were still asleep.” “But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.” 6.  Cross-hatchings of street noise and the Minotaur with his boy’s body. Narrowing. Rib cage the verge of a canoe. Armpit a whiff of pencil lead. 5.  “If you want to fuck me with that bottle, Mr. Arbuckle, best take the foil off first.” 4.osculation: a.  The act of kissing. A kiss. b.Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent. c.  To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough. 3.  Charmeuse chemise. A shuddering fall. Miss Adelaide Hall on the chaise longue singing I ain’t much caring / Just where I willend. Then jerked upright, skirt hiked to the knee, that bridge stretching out under every skip-step. Slaphappy scat-puppet of the fixed smile, the meanwhile,Ain’t got nobody to love now. 2.  The bone begging bowl. The foot that pushed it away. 1.  “I want to leave you exactly as I found you.”

Sonnet 19 (On His Blindness) by John Milton 1. spent In Sonnet 19, Milton makes the seemingly deliberate choice to avoid “the” and “a” — respectively, the most common and the sixth most common words in English usage. Instead of these articles — 
definite and indefinite — the poem stages a territorial dispute between 
possessives: the octave is “my” land, the sestet is “his” land, with the occasional “this” or “that” flagging no man’s land. We come to understand Milton’s mistake — the professed regret of the poem — as this act of claiming. It is only through his taking possession that the universal light is divided up, apportioned into “my light” — a finite commodity that by being subjected to ownership becomes capable of being “spent.” “Spent” — a word like a flapping sack. My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body — its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses — to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction. Should I have known, then, that by this act of self-claiming, I was cutting 
myself off from the eternal, the infinite, that I had fashioned myself into a resource that was bounded and, therefore, exhaustible? 2. wide The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive. A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way. We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me? 3. hide “But why hide it in a hole?” asks the Master, returning from his long absence, sparks of bewilderment flaring into rage. An unanswered question worries at the Parable of the Talents: why is the Master so terribly angry? It is not as if the servant had stolen the money, or spent it—his sin is one of omission, of overly risk-averse investing. A talent was a unit of weight in ancient Greece: in monetary terms, it was worth eighty pounds of silver, or 6,000 denarii—nearly twenty years’ wages for the average worker. But Milton uses the word in its more modern sense, dating from the fifteenth century: a natural ability or skill. How did a word for a deadweight of metal come to mean something inborn, innate? Confusion between the inorganic and the natural trickles into the parable and the poem. The Master prides himself on being a man who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he did not scatter seed. Was the servant’s fault to confuse coins for seeds, did he think he was planting when he was merely burying, did he mistake for viable what had no chance of living, what had never been alive? 4. bent And what about the hole, which for so long had held treasure? Did it wonder why — despite all the moistness and richness it could muster — those cold, glinting seeds never sprouted? Did it understand that, if released into the wider world, the coins could have quickened, multiplied? That instead of an incubator, the hole had become an oubliette, a place where otherwise fruitful things were sent to languish, to become lodged, useless? “Useless” — a word like a capped lead pipe, like the extra bone in my foot I will never pass down to my daughter. A thing becomes useless if it is bent out of shape. To “get bent” is to be put to another kind of use, a use my therapist considered tantamount to rape. To bend is to be bound, to bow down without breaking, with perhaps just the head tilted at an angle so as to peer upward. 5. present The Master has become the Maker. The servile body wholly “his,” splayed wide in a welcome-home, bound up in a beribboned bow. But the reader will object. This is all wrong. First of all, in the sonnet, “bent” doesn’t mean to bow down as if in submission to an outside force, but instead denotes an innate or internalized tendency or inclination. Second, a “present” is not a gift, but a verb meaning to offer openly, full-faced, the sun beaming down on a clean page. Third, the body never comes into it at all. “Therewith” — a safe word, a strongbox to be buried. 6. chide Is a “true account” a story or a sum? Is the Maker an audience or an auditor? The page scoured white by little grains of fear. A story has an ending. A sum has a bottom line. There was no accounting for me because my allotment leaked out of me, month after month, I scrubbed the sheets as if effacing the marks of a crime. Then one day the fear reversed itself. Like a photo negative but in higher contrast—its whites more glaring and its darks more glossy, as if a whisper-thin suspicion had come unzipped. “Chide” is an enormous understatement. The servant isn’t merely scolded, he is cast into “the outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” If the “outer darkness” is deemed to be a punishment, then does that lustrous inner darkness count as a reward? 7. denied It seems unfair, is Milton’s point. To be assigned a task, but not provided sufficient materials to complete it, is to be placed in a situation of contrived scarcity, like a lab rat or like the youngest sister in a fairy tale. The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins—which prefaces the Parable of the Talents — centers on this scarcity. The virgins wait for the bridegroom, to greet him with lamps alight. Five virgins have brought extra flasks of oil, but five virgins have let their lamps burn out and must go lampless into the night to look for oil. That much we are told, but questions hover around the shadowed margins of the story. Why isn’t the bridegroom with the bride? Why is he so delayed? Why is the bridegroom met in the middle of the night by a phalanx of lamp-bearing virgins, like a troupe of pom-pom girls or like a sacrificial rite? The virginity of the virgins renders them piquant, memorable. Adorning gothic portals, evoking thresholds, entrances, they are a particular feature of French cathedrals—much more so, one suspects, than if the parable had called them “maidservants” or even “bridesmaids.” The presumed desideratum of the story does not interest us much: the sated bridegroom at the midnight feast, the smug, unctuous faces of the wise virgins. Instead, the imagination pursues the foolish virgins rushing into the night, their desperation making them vulnerable, their vulnerability making them erotic, the fill-holes of their useless lamps dark and slick with oil. Is this how I was taught to sexualize insufficiency, the lack that set me wandering night after night, my body too early emptied out? 8. prevent “Prevent” — a word like a white sheet folded back to cover the mouth. A white egg bursts from the ovary and falls away, leaving a star-shaped scar.Corpus albicans, the whitening body. Such starbursts, at first, are scattered constellations, frost embroidering a dark field. But at what point does this white lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, opacity, obstacle—the ice disc clogging the round pond, the grid of proteins baffling the eye? “Prevent” — a word that slams shut, a portcullis (Latin:cataracta). Letter to Leonard Philaras, September 28, 1654: “the dimness which I experience by night and day, seems to incline more to white than to black.” 9. need Has Patience been looming in the background all along, silent, so as not to intrude upon a blind man’s consciousness? Patience, whose garment is “white and close-fitting so that it is not blown about or disturbed by the wind.” At the turn of the sonnet, Patience pries open its sculpted lips, its stiff tongue like a weaver’s shuttle drawing woolly strands through the warp and weft of Milton’s blindness, a white monologue that admits neither interruption nor rejoinder. Milton’s little murmur stitched back into his mouth. Woven tight enough to repel need — a liquid beading on the surface, the blood the needles drew from me week after week, hundreds of stoppered vials consigned to the biohazard bin, en route to the incinerator. “Need,” from the High German, for danger. “Murmur,” from the Sanskrit, a crackling fire. 10. best The best beam in contentment, ranging themselves in rows. Erect as test tubes but forswearing undue pride in such uprightness, mustering shoulder-to-shoulder with the fellow-elect. The best arrayed in regimental ranks, in refrigerated racks, white hymn of the unneeded, white hum of the unneeding. “Best,” originally superlative of bot(Old English: remedy, reparation). The best affect a pious pose, mouths held taut in tongueless Os.Sotto voce chorus of that soft, subjunctive song:if you were complete ... if you were replete ... Superlative. The most remediated. The most repaired. 11. state To be scooped out, emptied of need and rinsed clean of its greasy smears, pristine as a petri dish on a stainless lab table. Enucleated, the white of the egg awaiting an unknown yolk. “Yolk” from geolu(Old English: yellow). Not to be confused with “yoke” from geocian(Old English: to be joined together). A yoke is an implement, meant to be used, to fill a need. But where there is no field to be plowed, no wagon to be pulled, why demand a yoke that is useless, needless? One day the Romans sent for Cincinnatus to lead the republic against the invading Aequian army. He laid down his plow in the field and went to war. When the Aequians surrendered, Cincinnatus spared their lives but decreed that they must “pass under the yoke.” The Romans fashioned a yoke from three spears, two fixed in the ground, and one tied across the tops of the two verticals. Since the horizontal spear was only a few feet off the ground, the Aequians were made to crouch down like animals in order to complete the surrender. This is thought to be the origin of the word “subjugate,” to be brought under the yoke. To bear a yoke is to be bowed down, oxbowed, cowed. One day they laid me down on a gurney, my feet strapped in stirrups, my legs bent and splayed like the horns of a white bull. 12. speed But why would Milton, of all people, use the word “Kingly” as a compliment? Roundheaded Milton, who wrote tract after tract in defense of regicide, who would later be detained for opposing the Restoration? At this point, our suspicions are confirmed: Milton has disappeared entirely from the poem. We haven’t heard from him since the turn of the sonnet. We’ve been lulled by the cadenced voice of Patience, its dusty tongue self-lubricating, its pallid breath clouding the room, precipitating frangible chains of hydrocarbons, their branchings barbed like fluffs of eiderdown. Through the faint reticulations, we discern no dark stoop-shouldered figure, but only white-robed forms, upright as if hung from hooks, their faces unyielding as lanterns, shuttered as if once aflame. 13. rest Rest — a word like a gauze bandage, a ropy weave of collagen knitting its way across a wound. Outspread as if fingered, gelid gestures suggesting solace: to stanch, to shield, to seal, to shut off. Rest — the rind of the best, a contoured pod that cradles the shape of what it doesn’t hold. Rest — those who are left when thousands have sped away, the bereft, who litter the land, with husks for hands, vacant-eyed, vacant faces raised like basins under a contrail-scarred sky. 14. wait To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness. To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip. To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown. Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape. To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.