Pleasure Palace

Christine Kwon

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.

Christine Kwon is a poet and fiction writer living in New Orleans. Her work has been published in Joyland Magazine and Sweet Mammalian.
Originally published:
January 1, 2015

Featured

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware

Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis
Meghan O’Rourke

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