I could direct your eye or tapping foot,
direct your ear but I could not direct you here,
a bright green place, the sun flooding leaves
instead of lids, as if I placed them there, in pleasure
of my body and the world, minus body and world,
the relationship left to move bodiless, like a season.
Once, mid-dance, a girl's eyes, like Vaseline,
clarified, rolling to white as if in sudden boil.
She had been mouthing along.
I saw a word taut between her lips and life,
its twisting shape, and I knew
it wasn't solely drugs but her backpedaling,
her posture alone in bed, its embarrassing requests,
clinging to the effluvial, stamped, glittered, lost.
Pleasure Palace
Christine Kwon
Christine Kwon is a poet and fiction writer living in New Orleans. Her work has been published in Joyland Magazine and Sweet Mammalian.
Featured
10 Ways Ms., Sassy, and Jezebel Changed Your Life!
How contradiction drove fifty years of feminist media
Maggie Doherty
How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer
Her boldly innovative translation of the Iliad is an epic for our time
Emily Greenwood
You Might Also Like
Subscribe
New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
Subscribe