Leigh Lucas
MOON YEONG SHIN
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polariod, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what's the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. I've spent my whole
life in orbit of other people's light, celestial satellite
in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn
from a stranger's surname? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the first time.
“We don't receive the things we want because we deserve them. Most of the time we get them because we are blind and lucky. It's in the act of having, the daily tending, that we have an opportunity to become deserving. It's not a place to be reached. It is a constant betwixt and between. It's in that hollow, liminal space that I think—hope?—humility can be achieved.”
“It's almost as if having a child allows a woman to see how much infinite potential there is, allows her to see infinity itself. (Am I making any sense?)
It's almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it.
Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life.
But how can I become a god?”
“In A Mapmaker's Dream, Fra Mauro decides the search for the ultimate map ends with the individual. “Wise men contemplate the world,” he thinks, “knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves.” It may be folly to imagine anything more universal, more objective, more true. Each of us stands at one unique spot in the universe, at one moment in the expanse of time, holding a blank sheet of paper. This is where we begin.”
From “I Swam in a Cold Lake and Watched My Body Convulse on Shore”
“...
When offering small sandwiches
I might stare out of one of the windows,
imagine the ocean blue. Or, say, when cleaning
up a toddler's vomit, I might yearn
for a less solitary life. But otherwise, loneliness
might be okay when surrounded by other
flight attendants in the sky, my body
a body made for tending to bodies in flight.
I'd breathe in the air of neither
here nor there. I'd remember everything
about my lives on earth.”
The Half-Sister, Unmet
Paint the edges of an imagined life in a foreign tongue,
in a land rich in exotics: silk hanboks, piled-high beaded
pearl hair pieces, tea ceremonies, swallowing odd animal eggs.
Exotic because it's over there, inappropriate, of course,
for fetishizing the other. (I am performing). Let's say
how inadequate: my fecundity swells up sudden, a heavy
perfume at the apex before the slope to decay. Our heads
nestled on one pillow, we might have whispered to each other
tiny confessions of who we lusted after, even loved. Sisters. Secret
keepers. Probably, we would have hated each other.
“...I'm still trying to find words that can strike forward to the possibility—but I try not to grab them because you taught me that words are not meant to be owned. I marvel from the side at their madness. The striking is not academic. It wears a leather jacket on some days. It changes the weather. On rainy days, it is beautiful and has two-inch talons.”
...now as you eat what your mother eats
her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds.
but still the light is thick in the trees. the callery
pears are loud this season & my throat is bright
with flowers for you both. such beautiful flowers
i hardly have the words.
- for my niblings in anticipation of their birth
“Beside the bridge off track, gone stray:
The English Call it War Aphrodisia, and leave it to the Brits to make strumpetting sound Shakespearean. If there is a God, and Sis I grow more skeptical by the hour, He's a mean one and is tending an Erastus-sized hole in my chest. Well, He just keeps scooping it out. I've been sniffing necks to find him again, fibbing into crewcuts, telling them they smell like piecrust when they smell like blood and mold and hunter and prey...Yesterday afternoon I saw a mound of children's bones and by nightfall I was singing, but today the thought of his strong, brown hands broke me.”
What the Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
“Let's say it takes all night
for us to get home, the train having to make
every stop, & everyone forgetting to step off
the first,
even second times,
so there's all this looping back
& back, while we're still kissing that kiss, that green,
& June”
- from “I Dream on a Crowded Train with My Eyes Open, Body Swaying”
“If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself.”
“It's hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.”
“She may have glanced in my direction when she said this, but I cannot tell for certain. “My” direction is in the same direction as the window (directly behind me), which is filthy and crawling with flies and looks out at the miles and miles of fields and sky and galaxies beyond that, and then to infinity. So perhaps not.”
“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away. Every single thing I have created worth a damn has been a practice of love, healing, and redemption. I know this process to be divine.”
“It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase—and have been given—is validation, acceptance, and success, but only on terms set by white men. Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity....Can they [white women] get past themselves and get on our level? Only then do we have a chance. In Johnnie Tillmon's words, “No woman can be liberated, until all women get off their knees.”
“I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way back to each other. I want us to play songs for each other on the radio. And when we call out across an airwave or telephone or a chat room or an app or a city street or an open field or our bedroom, I want us each to hear , miraculously, a voice calling back.”
