Sun Yung Shin

No more hangings, no more gas chambers. No one allowed to remain in the center of the labyrinth, guarding their dna from the world, from the future. No more contemplation, no more waste. Everyone leaning toward paradise. Shields down and the word enemy will pass from memory. You are my kind.

This is you—Titanus giganteus, your maw snapping pencils in half and cutting through human flesh. My encyclopedia chokes on your bulk. My camera, timid, afraid to look, as if you’re naked—not one adult male, but millions. Few garments sound as fine as flak jacket, the best of the tagmata the thorax, more prime than brains as the body can keep mating, cracking its margins. Your shield like a wing, protects your bulletproof heart from the wind, your right arm black in the cloth of your brothers. Full face visor. Baby gladiator. Beyond the screen, memorized—jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars. Insect lord, insect mind. This is my fear. You look like my brother, my son. You could kill me with your looks.

Because of time being an arrow, I had to imagine everything. I had to fold the song with my mind because of the time being. Wash the rice here, in the present. Because of the arrow I pent up the fourth wall as though I were diapering my own newborn. I put time to the breast, though I feared it was not an arrow but an asp. Being time I kept that fear under my tongue like a thermometer. I felt its mercury rolling under my teeth, boiling like language. A deaf man, an old man, I am his hand, rough and gentle, an arrow here and then. Time, I can see what I feel. In the future even your future becomes my past. Arrow, I have died. There is peace. I pull it from me like a blanket. As in a dream, because of time being an arrow, I put on the dress of a young, lovely mother. Because of her, because of the time, here I am, always watching over you.

Some(where a) woman wears the face once given. Possessions scarce we go halves on slant of eye & span of palm with cousin & other ghosts. Where is the man with the face lent mother? Fathers rare;infant found at Shinkyo police station box—official shoes careened around fortune of Name & birth, pin & note. Elsewhere (Norway, Australia) another Korean National bears the imprint of my din. Cribs, nurse, hands, rice-milk powder, down & rocked—carefully dated checks. American/Father asks Why. We don’t speak. Years burn to decades, this permanent occupation.

All birds—even those that do not fly —have wings A constant confession Admission of omission This is your punctuated equilibrium And everything in between Slow it down The moment of extinction The death of the last individual of a species (Let’s put it aside for now) Stay with it This is our gene flow How do you like our genetic drift A riff, a rift, a raft… Too rough for the second half Take us under, take us downhill Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body The new party god Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop Crick & Watson Evo-devo This is your mother’s local phenomenon If this is racial hygiene Why do I feel so dirty? Microcosmic soul It’s an involutionary wonderland This living matter A modern synthesis 4.6 billion years of biology Can’t stop the ideology Graduate from meet/mate To fitness landscape of sexual selection From land over sea It’s a hard lyric The impression of a key in a bar of soap A transitional fossil Keep camping Plant the flag Bury the burial mound Put the pop in popular And the sigh in science

Like a wedding ring, or the bride’s green ribbon, you shelter me. No business but war. You remind me of a kind of heaven. A cairn of rocks casting shadows in the shape of a man. Thou art the table before me in the sight of my adversaries, thou dost anoint my head: oil and rain, thou art a ghost with a girl’s mouth, thou art not the making of my dreams—under water, under cliff, under this long suitcase of earth and bombs. More than any mortal could gather beneath the skirt of the sky. You are never eager, nor famished, nor pale with a craving for white clothes or my nocturnes. Let your lynx approach, even tiger, even its wild outline. You need no ferryman or the obolus of the dead. If I put a coin in my mouth I taste copper, not the corpse. They say that bodies fertilized the ground so well the trees grow bright and tall. The bones blur. We return alive.