Sandra Lim

I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver. How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you, the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today. Curiouser and curiouser, your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes. In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry. You put on my heat, (that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly, hungering down the valley, no one question to cover all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use. You’re wrong and right at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring chopping down the back door. You slap my attention all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime? Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.

Taking on an aspect of the Orient, Skies full of hatchets and oranges Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood: But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor? Skies full of hatchets and oranges Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor, As the nights grow steadily into mountains. Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— The princess braids these into a necklace As the nights grow steadily into mountains, Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly. The princess braids these into a necklace: Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace. Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly In a solitude full of wars and songs. Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace Never converge in that vast landscape; In a solitude full of wars and songs, The words remain light and fugitive. Never converge in that vast landscape In the way that stars keep their distance. The words remain light and fugitive In an anticipation crossed with absence. In the way that stars keep their distance, Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood In an anticipation crossed with absence, Taking on an aspect of the Orient.

Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears. They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot. Not so small after all, we micro to macro, swelling to the horror shows lifted from the sly ways of life. You, both scorched and shining in the terror of the equivocal moment, its box of cheeky logics rattling cold certainties out of bounds and into the plaits of a girl’s desirous ends. A little debauched, the flirt in a freckling, wondering spun to falling comes to this pert contract of a paradox: saying things because they will do no good, ringing change in frumpy mono-determination, fruity and fruitless. Exploded out of shelter, the tides come roaring in. Let in the hoarse Cassandras and the dull pain of the storyteller. You’ve needed those eyes all along. We thought them disconcerting at first, but it’s the only way. You live here now having exchanged etiquette for energy. Don’t be clever, don’t be shy! Participate today. Yesterday you say everything for their own sake, and soon enough, tomorrow, you learn a lot from them.

We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”

Perhaps you can tell children that the world is always a more beautiful place than you can suppose, and then you release them into their future, the black row of trees in the distance. She died suddenly in midwinter, in the same bed in which her husband died years earlier; it still sagged on his side. Her second husband remained in Japan with his first family. She used to say, what my three girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me. My mother is the middle daughter, a garden of inaudible tunes. The four of them lived in a mean house in Seoul. One yellowing picture of my grandmother remains, and her face turns away from the camera, as the rabbit senses the hound; she was said to be a solitary eater, an inner thing. What did she promise the world that she wasn’t able to make good on? A child who abruptly feels the frontiers of experience assert themselves in her: at the funeral my mother cries so hard she can’t feel her hands for days, it explains how she scratches herself raw, meaningless. You have always believed these are your themes: fate, the negative pleasures of dipping oneself in acid. You think it will rescue you from your simplicity, remarks my mother from the doorway, but art is never the ace in the hole. I am not a stupid child. I am not even a child any longer, with her hesitant, then terrible certainty, that loss is tragic, not only pointless. When she is lonely, my mother cooks; and when she is happy, she knows to hide it.

When he called, there were 261 emotions at play. I thought there were only wistfulness, humiliation, and mere bitterness left, but lo, I see now the brilliance in the numbers. Emotions 75 and 78 made me happy just to know they existed. I felt less alone, more impervious. I was emboldened by the existence of 152. Though, how was I supposed to accept 9, 14, and 179? We deserved better, distress and indigence aside. Something about 260 broke the spell inside me and offered up a tiny shift: I opened my eyes in the fog and tore off the surfaces of 261 and 4 with a great shout.

Inside every world there is another world trying to get out, and there is something in you that would like to discount this world. The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts, and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one. You could claim professional fondness for the world around you; the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive, and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors. Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one— is this the great world, which is whatever is the case? The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning. Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life? Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some, and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.