Sueyeun Juliette Lee

My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a suppurative response—one that collects under the skin—to this invisible, blistering, cracklesome lightning scar. One can’t choose the mood that gathers, the body’s response. The brightest moments of the day rarely correlate to a discharge. Gray sky or blackness, a foggy haze aswirl between stars and nothing halts. Some moments tear my teeth. The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.

How much chemical disorder can be survived depends                on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart                  stopped beating. Today death is                                  believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after                                      the heart stops beating because after                                     several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than         10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can       now be survived without brain injury.     Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s             beliefs about when death                             occurs obsolete merely transitory evidence          a stray boundary between a much longer-lasting            (invisible opposite polarities feature                                                             the fields annihilate the field tries to                        one another repel the intruder                        rapidly velocities     directly                    shine in emission visible                                                              shortly in terms of                  before brightness                              totality

We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of their terror as they plunge across vast, glowing glacial faces. All of this takes place alongside an abstractly relentless gunmetal sea. I can feel you turn to me, wetness marking the corners of your lips and eyes. I, too, am mesmerized, my vision limited to a sense of motion on the peripheries. Later, I am summoned for an impromptu scan and, miraculously, I pass.

let’s start there. let’s start there.   (3 /9 new oddcouple friendship raised many eyebrows one thing he doesn’t want “I come in peace and basketball some hungover blue blue a doe-eyed girl, I was trying to tell you a simple story did you want me back on Celebrity Apprentice yes yes yes yes a real human being who let his guard down ((he’s not his dad I’m sleeping in your bed while you sleep smothered in stars, a foreign city not the dirtbag you fight to shrug off inside he says that he don’t want war

we aren't differentiable with bangs and hooded lids. I know the likeness doesn't stop right there. what's so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable. it rips and roars between and through. we both have found our mother's jewels. buried in closets, rolled in silk thread and bunting. done in scarlet, fortunately found, never for the men in sharing. these are our secrets. our punch lines and couplets. I went to bed thinking "pixies." the bliss and after- math of a spiritual kiss. how you resonate without rooms, maintaining perfect valences. where is the disaster at the end of this dread? in my dream state you were queen, a reigning bodhisattva without a sprig. I climbed inside your belly. punched inside you laughed and laughed, converting persimmons into a freedom jelly. Slathered all over, I found us exuberant, happy to swing or go both ways.

korea might be gay but I do not think you are. korea is a peninsula. you and I are people meaning that we have hair we comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an adopted meaning. the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a hand- shake, a limp fish or glass of lukewarm tea. the fact of the matter is that standing on a stage everything is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstan- tial "universe," a minor disaster or floating chord. the darkness is outside when I see you, not in. I laugh when the funny thing gets said, and mostly I laugh inside. on the inside is without curves and artifi- cial spaces, many of them not gay or korea. but when I see you they all run and speech is maybe stammer, sometimes slur. margaret cho, your tongue might wreak more havoc than in speaks, outside being from the vantage point of escalating stairs, from dark glasses and escapades. the vantage being from a great height, a lighter space on the inside that was formerly before the dark and laugh. we really wait for the funny things before they are said and let go for ever after. margaret, there are many funny sisters and there are many porn stores. I too think woo lae ok is really petri- fied of its own fish. that there are babies and there are dykes, that this little piggy has something, that a pubic mound transforms into a public space, not being gay or with outstanding curves, prayerful and abashed, facing the tide, grown over, rediscovered in the woods by strangers and haunted for years and years.

a perfect symmetry of both parts animal, feline and quizzical, and man, made (undone) sworn in stormed again electric, transmitted from the foreground into appropriate weather the skin being elastic cause for several considerations contrite ((argued over) aren't we of beautiful tangents beautiful ox blood, black sand morning from small wire filigree, a gesture

and who are you now in this different blue space without pain remarking on chemtrails and snowmelt,   misreading the “sea” whose letters cease to arrive remain transfixed in midflight       turbulent coasts aloft as a principle of life-- count invisible clams under nameless sands cut apostrophes into the air     announcements send far-flung greetings to strangers for days keep the magma enigma at bay        daily joys effaced vaporous pale generous smoke rising so cling to the dark hand inside you its basalt fingers, rounded