So begins Stanley Kunitz's Reflections for The Collected Poems, published in 2020, compiling seven decades worth of his poems. I read this one night in early April, & was struck by the clarity of meaning of the words arranged in this first paragraph. On living & dying, to say they happen at once feels utterly truthful, but the mere slant rhyme of the seeming opposites is not the intended achievement of their specific purpose in a verb phrase. If Kunitz said that life & death happened at once, it would’ve taken me down a different path of thinking, as death is an irreversible, permanent state, while dying is conditioned to being alive. With living & dying at once, I do not wonder about the many ways that life & death coexist in the world, such as losing a parent as a child is born, or bringing home a new puppy as a war kills thousands on another continent, or Kunitz’s own family history of losing his father by suicide before his birth. There is clarity in living & dying because they are the same journey with different emphases, & within the confines of mortality, the reader accepts this as a fact regardless of their environment & relationships.

In the second sentence, I wonder whether the subject that remains compassionate & whole is the writer or the poem. Can an indifferent writer compose a compassionate poem? Is a compassionate & whole person more meaningful than a compassionate & whole poem? Or is it the other way around? But this last sentence of the paragraph is, in fact, not equivocal. With a single word, compassion, Kunitz rejects nihilism that bitterly submits to the inevitability of death, & leaves room for fear & grief towards life’s impermanence. With whole, Kunitz gives equal acknowledgement to hope & devastation, knowing that to live & write without the recognition of life’s ending, or to dictate the ways of living & writing based on the knowledge of life’s ultimate conclusion, are both less than whole.

On the specificity of words, note clatter in this paragraph :

Poems would be easy if our heads weren’t so full of the day’s clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.

This clatter Kunitz writes of, despite its closeness in sound & potentially exchangeable quality in this context, is not clutter, which is synonymous with mess, meaning a state of disorganization. A day’s clutter connotes unfinished tasks, an exhausting pile of them, disorder of responsibilities, a mundane dread, resentful placation, denied insurance claims, line at the laundromat. Clatter is aggressive, high-pitched, & immediately irritating. A day’s clatter is a fugue, a chemical intoxication by mysterious poison, helpless loss of cognitive function, the deafening laughter of the world laughing without you, uncontrollable dissatisfaction. Clutter feels manageable, has potential to change. Clatter doesn’t.

Those of us who are not dilettantes can learn to be inspired by the clatter sometimes, but ultimately, we do not want to find ourselves saying that’ll do, surrendering to the barrier of noise, connecting two dots at most, using abstraction & obscurity interchangeably, becoming comfortable with the lack of depth. Kunitz is fully aware— he is a writer who became the Poet Laureate of the United States at age 95 after all— that this clatter doesn’t leave when you’ve gained more experience or sense of control over your life. Perhaps to connect with the stars & the tides, we shouldn’t hold onto this feeling of knowing or having a handle on things because if Kunitz had been absorbed by being a man, he would’ve failed to write so vividly how much it hurt to be a boy.

The Portrait

Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father

for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,

that spring

when I was waiting to be born.

She locked his name

in her deepest cabinet

and would not let him out,

though I could hear him thumping.

When I came down from the attic

with the pastel portrait in my hand

of a long-lipped stranger

with a brave moustache

and deep brown level eyes,

she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard.

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.

My love for the English language began in childhood, which is strange considering I grew up in Seoul, Korea, where the majority of the population doesn’t speak English. My mother, a middle school English teacher, had an ambition for her firstborn to learn Korean & English simultaneously in my earliest developmental stages. I could group Apple & Alligator & Alphabet at age 2, while learning how to say “Good morning” & “Can I have a cookie?” in Korean. By third grade, I spoke fluent English, though lacking the big words, & I helped my mom come up with mid-term quizzes for her students. The truth is, I loved speaking & writing in English because it made my mom happy, until I met an American man from Chicago.

In fifth grade, I was enrolled in an after-school program for kids who could stand to learn more difficult texts in English. M, who taught this class, was a white man from Chicago with rosy cheeks & an MA in English Literature. He always wore a button-down & chewed the push button of his pen. He discovered early on in the program that my English was more advanced than the rest of the kids. My mother was thrilled when he reached out to say he’d be happy to teach me for an extra 20 minutes after the after-school program. During the additional weekly one-on-ones, M taught me how to cite sources & format letters, as well as mellifluous vocabulary. He gave me real books, instead of the chopped-up paragraphs in textbooks. (My first epistolary was a copy of his: Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster.) He corrected my writing with a red pen, which he chewed up to almost non-existence. He wrote me sticky notes that said, “Some mistakes, but really interesting story. –M.” Those notes made me feel so seen as a young girl, because while my mother was only interested in my command of the language, he cared about my stories– he liked what I had to say. Soon enough, he gave me his phone number & said I could text him to use more English every day. I texted with him day & night, about my parents fighting, my sister’s first communion, almost getting hit by a car, chocolate milk for dinner, etc. He didn’t correct the errors in my texts then, & I mostly remember a lot of his responses being “I’m sorry you’re feeling sad” or “It’s not your fault.” One late night, I was texting under the covers, when he said I was not only pretty & sweet, but also smart & interesting. I would ask you out in a heartbeat if you were older. The Google search for alternative meanings of the phrase “ask someone out” came up empty & I dreaded composing a response. Funnily, my mom wasn’t alarmed to discover this. She told me it wasn’t surprising that an adult man would be interested in dating me because I was so mature. You should probably stop texting him… but let him down gently.

Before I could “let him down gently,” he was already mortified & apologetic, & texted he had had a couple of beers, which led to a terrible mistake. I told him it was alright, but I could no longer text him or take his after-school plus after after-school classes. I didn’t see him much afterward, & pretty soon I was a truculent high schooler with nowhere that felt like home. In 2018, after a non-negligible first read of Lolita & a couple of nights spent in the McDonald’s parking lot running away from my parents, I sent him an email. It was an impassioned, self-pitying, dripping mess of an email, with carefully reviewed grammar, big words, & big blaming. To this day, I honestly don’t know why I did it. I was starting to go out with older men at that point, & maybe I felt like I had overcome what had kept M from pursuing me years ago. He did not hold back upon receiving my email:

I had to go back to Chicago for a while, but I missed you every day since… I’m so sorry… I love you… I care about you so much… I’m sorry… I regret leaving you alone… It is truly my biggest regret… I will come get you… whatever you want me to do…

Instincts pushed me to shut it down then. As dumb as I was, I knew enough to understand love doesn’t come that easily. His response left me with unsettling fear & self-hatred, as it reinforced my belief that normal men don’t love me, hence confirming my suspicion that M wasn’t a normal man. I told him it was a mistake to reach out & that I never wanted to hear from him again, which was the end of us.

I moved to Baltimore for college in 2019, & English has been my primary language since. I speak Korean a handful of times a year when I call my parents, & I rarely read or write in Korean. English shares almost nothing in common with my native language, & I continue to learn new words, idioms, & metaphors. Outside the confines of a Creative Writing classroom, didactic comments about my grammatical errors, excessive compliments about my impressive English, snappy corrections of my pronunciation, & requests to speak up come from all directions, encompassing friends, coworkers, & strangers. As I realize myself as a person who is expressive through language, I try my best to just laugh about it when someone feels the need to tell me that the correct thing to say is “my tail is frozen,” not “my tail is froze.”

The assumption of incorrectness is generally rooted in racism, & I have not much desire to write about it at this time. Although I do ponder on the products of racism containing so much nuance, e.g., Black people’s incorrect use of grammar as ghetto & hood, which sets the tone that it is cultural, yet still perceived as déclassé, vs. Asian people’s incorrect use of grammar as foreign, which sets the tone that it is a mistake, lacking in experience.

One can score an easy high from imposing oneself on others as a teacher, but what gets lost in this type of interaction is the opportunity to learn something perhaps more meaningful than froze vs. frozen, or it vs. they, or is vs. was. The quality of a thought or an idea is not defined by the quality of its delivery, & more often than not, we need help bringing brilliant stories to life. The implacable fixation on correctness deters the joy of communication & loses beautiful & creative moments in language. I happen to believe that a language is more a vessel for sharing than a standard to uphold, & anyone who truly loves the language doesn’t aim for the easy highs.

In these dreams, I experience torture of all sorts. On the night of December 30th, Blake Lively is my stepmother. She says I am “hard to look at,” & pulls my hair while I scream. As I take the first bite of a slice of apple pie, she cuts open my t-shirt from behind with scissors. She almost punctures near my spine with the sharp metal gadget, but she is not bothered. I remind her that I am traumatized from the last time I got a spinal tap, but my voice isn’t reciprocated. I think about my sister, although she is not present in the house. The apple pie is nowhere to be found, & the black countertop is full of Honey Crisps & potato chips. Blake Lively is a skinny woman with large breasts, & she drags me by my ankle into the bathroom with ease, like she is a giant or I am a dwarf. I see sequins fall off her clothes onto the floor. I am stripped of the rest of my clothes & put in the bathtub. Blake Lively hits me in the head with her hand. I bang the temple of my head on the faucet, & she frantically cuts my hair with her scissors, close to the scalp. She pulls out a rough sponge & rubs it against my limbs all over. She splashes hot water on me over & over, tries to scrub away at something I can’t see. The strands of my dark hair glue onto my skin & every surface of the bathroom. I beg her to let me go home. She breaks my nose. I wake up sneezing.

To record the terrorizing sequence of events in the dream feels like an unnecessarily prolonged affliction, but I sleep with my phone next to my head, & I am not much without my desire to turn the ridiculous & fleeting into anything visible or legible or tangible. So it isn’t hard to believe that I wanted to get drunk on the 31st, pass out on the bed with no memory of anything, & sleep like my consciousness is locked up in a thoughtless jail. After years of irregular streaks of nightmares (or night terrors or whatever they’re called), I grew a hatred for the idea of epiphanies. This may sound contradictory to my love for poems, but a poem sits at the most advanced stage of synthesizing life’s mystery. A poem is an exacting result of a writer’s resistance towards reduction or exaggeration, her last-ditch effort to capture something complex as is, to disobey the human instinct to make sense of scattered & disconnected information, learn a lesson out of a mere coincidence, create a miracle or hope inside an utterly indifferent world that is life. Most good poems are, or at least they try to be, anything but epiphanies. & in that same vein, I am repulsed by Dream As A Glimpse Of The Subconscious/Unconscious. I am not trying to debate Freud here, but rather, trying to decide for myself that I won’t be held hostage to my own stories.

When I say I won’t be held hostage to my own stories, I mean I won’t let them change the way I feel about writing about them. A bad dream cannot threaten me with turning into a prophecy, & a devastating, perilous emotion cannot threaten me with sticking around forever. A prescient piece of writing can perhaps only be an achievement, never a goal. In her 2017 documentary, Joan Didion recalls when she was in El Salvador during the Civil War. She describes what she saw, which most people could only call tragic– children in alleyways high on acid, hallucinating, dying. After a discernible pause, she says, “It was gold.” She meant it was literary gold– the type of story that writers only dream of stumbling upon, if one can effectively set aside righteousness, guilt, & self-centeredness in the equation of writing. To feel bad is a lazy response as a writer, & this is uncomfortable to accept until you are stuck in a carousel of easy, meaningless stories that no one would or should give a damn about.

Miami Beach is not a place you visit to nurture your ambition, or sharpen your knife, or steady your breath. During the extensive & inorganic nice-to-meet-you’s, late dinners, & networking events, the incredible weight of self-obsession stands like a tombstone between people. Personally, I can testify to meeting a number of nice people, or people mature enough to be nice to others when there is no immediate financial or social reward. But I would be dishonest to say the constant scanning up & down, & eyes glazing over to check out the actually important person while shaking my hand didn’t stand out as a defining characteristic of this annual event.

On my way from NADA back to Miami Beach, I texted S a quite beautiful Diebenkorn drawing because it reminded me of his work. He asked if I was becoming more jaded about art from being in Miami & working at a gallery. I told l him I am rather hopeful & that was honest, but as we were texting, I was also on a water taxi passing by DJ Kahled’s $ 29M mansion, fuming in the back of my mind about that gorgeous chick who was bragging about her magic touch that got people “hooked” on buying art.

I met this gorgeous chick at M’s waterfront home. M is the daughter of the couple who own the R Collection, one of the biggest private contemporary art collections in North America. M’s home is beautiful– enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the natural light, a serious but not-so-heavy study filled with collectible art books, & boldly sized contemporary artworks in every room of the house. She was lending her home to host a brunch for women in art, which I was invited to thanks to my gender & hustle. After approaching the few familiar faces & so lamely iterating how impressed I was with the sculptures in the living room, I pivoted towards the buffet counter, & grabbed a bagel & some lox, which in hindsight was very delicious. That’s when I met F, the stunning & confident art advisor-deluxe born in England, raised in Switzerland, & based in Flatbush. I introduced myself to her when she was toasting her bagel, & we connected over our lives in New York. In the hopes of making a friend, I brought up my boyfriend & his remote tech job that allowed us to take this trip together. Her eyes lit up for a second when I mentioned his job, then seamlessly segued into her elevator pitch: the art of getting the Nouveau Riche to pay for art. She articulated nothing in particular, but highly emphasized that her “magic touch” had her clients begging to raise their annual collecting budgets. Unsurprisingly, this art of sales has almost nothing to do with art, but everything to do with a sense of exclusivity, proximity to beauty, & illusion of superiority. Whether you are the hot art advisor who makes an excellent dinner date or the wholesome art advisor who recommends the best nannies for Connecticut moms, they both follow the same blueprint, & I tend to feel irritated by the kind of people who can barely say anything meaningful about the work they’re trying to sell. As I started talking about an artist, she stopped me & gave me her number. “Text me later,” she said as she walked away, & the aroma of bullshit & apple turnover filled up the room.

So I think Miami Beach is a place where you indulge in whoever you think yourself to be. An adventurous yet sophisticated man who spends a million dollars on a Warhol rather than a McLaren, who goes on art tours in São Paulo to support local art rather than going to Ibiza, who fucks chicks with MAs from Sotheby’s rather than a Sports Illustrator model… is met with no suspicion or cringe in Miami. The high of buying a painting consists of the feeling of nobility for supporting the arts & the feeling of superiority for appreciating something that most people can’t. In my opinion, Miami is an excellent place to experience that high, with an added thrill of maybe having to compete with another person to possess what you want. I find these people immensely interesting– for all their surprising passions & shallow motivations– which perhaps speaks to the fact that I’m not quite jaded yet, or that I’m committed to my own shallow motivations.

What has been a high for me these days is seeing A up close as he identifies what he enjoys & resists in a painting. It’s rare to see someone develop curiosity from scratch. An art advisor once told me, “You can’t teach curiosity,” & I don’t have a counterargument. As much as I’d like to say that my boyfriend is proof that you can, it’s a flawed argument since I have sex with him. A spent hours each day at the fair, taking pictures of what interested him, explaining to me why something was interesting & why he would like to have them. Talking/writing about art is an unexpectedly challenging activity that requires consistent reading/conversing to be good at, but the feeling of attraction or repulsion is only a reflex until one can articulate why. & understanding his life experiences, the environment he grew up in, his travel & homemaking preferences, makes it all the more interesting for me to learn about his aesthetic gravitations, his interest & the lack of it for certain narratives, as well as his risk tolerance for purchasing. It’s like seeing a child grow up & it makes a bit more sense now why people say it’s a privilege to be a parent.

It tears me up a bit, because it made me think about my most recent case of grief– my godmother’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. The woman who raised me from age 1 to 6 & is responsible for at least half of the good memories from my childhood is diagnosed terminally ill, & this is the kind of music I find unfair. It hurts to write what is true because my heart rejects this reality. It is unjust that someone who has spent so much of their life in suffering & perseverance is sentenced to even more suffering. This kind of injustice isn’t mere individual misfortune, but a stone-cold example of a pattern in cosmic indifference. For many who believe they have endured undeserving mistreatment, including myself, it is comforting to subscribe to constructs like karma, or the absolute balance between pain & joy. It nurtures hope, in moments that feel unbearable, that somehow the scale will tip even & what you deserve is what you will have. Perhaps we collectively concluded that hope is the miracle cure for all our devastating realities, but speaking for myself, I am rather humiliated by my own entitlement in this formula of hope.

As a younger person, I considered karma as a sort of passive form of revenge. If a girl said something mean to me at school & I didn’t have the words to hurt her back, or if a boy left me for another girl & I didn’t have the guts to immediately move on with another boy, or if my dad threatened to emancipate me & I didn’t have the means to live without him, I imagined the universe would eventually take care of my dignity. The idea of karma relieved me from the burden of being vulnerable & communicating my hurt, as well as the all-consuming plotting & execution of revenge. It made a lot of sense that this was a Buddhist concept, considering how “morally superior” & “chill” it made me feel.

Necessarily, I grew out of that spell of chill-ness. At some point in college, my therapist said to me, “Good things happen to bad people & bad things happen to good people,” & I cried & cried & cried. Now, I cannot determine with any ease who are good people or bad people. Within the spectrum of normality, intentions are a complex blend of selfishness & honesty that cannot be measured on a scale of morality. Recently, I confronted my apartment sublessor for signing a renewal without notice & stealing my security deposit. All she had to say was that she didn’t know there was such a thing as a security deposit & that it was my fault for not letting her know in advance. No matter how ridiculous this sounds at face value, I truly have no way of knowing whether she believes her assignment of blame. I am pissed off that I’ve been taken advantage of, but I relate to her desperation– that disconcerting position of scarcity & shamelessly doing whatever it takes. In the depths of grieving the news about my godmother, I pointlessly dwell on the idea of karma that used to make me so comfortable. I desperately wonder if I let go of the money & show forgiveness to my sublessor, the universe would take the sickness away from my godmother, only to realize once again how illogical this is. There is no foreseeable give & take, no extra kindness or blessing for the woman who was nothing but selfless the whole time I’ve known her. It seems there is no cosmic punishment for crooks, & no cosmic reward for saints, & that’s the rusty music of the way things go.

These days, I try my best to pick the right battles & fight for what I want, because I want my godmother to fight. I hope that she will fight for the best treatment & care, more time to experience joy & indulgence, & just more time to live. I hope that she will overcome the feeling of betrayal after all her goodwill & generosity to the world. I hope what happens next is the music she never thought she could write– the sound of a long, warm shower & a nice dinner somebody else made for her. & eternal, eternal gratitude from me, for taking me out to the playground & showing off my drawings to all the neighborhood parents, for letting me cover her cabinets with stickers, & for laughing with me in the back of the car, at the grocery store, & in bed every night before she stroked my hair to sleep.

I read carefully, a book I read before, about Wolves, Alfred Hitchcock’s dinner parties, 36 plots of tragic situations, identical twins, & what the whales sound like in Manhattan. My eyes glaze over the ornate & mysterious lines, & I take deep breaths to kill the thoughts of my arguments that I held back. I was still a circuitous woman, despite all the things I cut out from my speeches, & even though I was listened to, I felt a loss of respect in A & my relationship. Jessica from the Well says, Bring me back alive. It was so simple to come down. I’ve tried talking to women qualified in grief, eating ice cream, & having sex until it hurt, but never figured out how to turn off a bad feeling. Given my character, I will always be retentive, a little too sentimental, clumsily stitched at the seams & terrestrial, rippling from just air, inconceivable & full of night.

Birdie says I am Birdie. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. I am hurting myself. I can’t tell time you know. A tells me my love seems fragile. I look at him like he broke me.

In the past couple of months, men built three levels of scaffolding at the gallery building & they hammer at something every day. In times when your home doesn’t feel like your home & you storm out to call your friends about this betrayal, you realize there is no quiet in the city. Bonnie & Clyde on the Motorcycle circle around the block blasting some shitty cover of a song, young men yell & laugh on the basketball court, & no one can turn off the car alarm. When I called, B talked about security– how some men can give it to you easily & gladly. B pointed that no one can say the right thing always, but some people never know how to make you feel secure. In Manhattan what the whales sound like at night is blue & unpossessable. A sounds like he’s telling me he is Honesty instead of Flattery, Love instead of Infatuation. I am Kieren. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. I don’t know the difference between love & real love. I don’t want his Love & Honesty anymore.

By the time I’m 25, I don’t know where I will be. Once I felt so much joy in his pleasure that I would have kissed & touched another girl he picked for me. Once I adopted his thoughts like my own & tried to see the things that he saw in other girls. I said I would kiss them when he asked if I would. I agreed with him when he said they were hot. Now I don’t feel sexy. I only feel used. This many days into my life, I have come to this.

After allowing so much disrespect already, I do not know how to accept an apology. I am tired of the lack of anything luminescent & trustworthy, & I blame myself. Now I know that you don’t expect pure intentions from someone who cares so embarrassingly deeply about appearances. This time around forgiveness asks for the abandonment of intelligence, & I wish I woke up with no inkling of anything. I wish it didn’t hurt to see his face & his mouth move. In December, I will be perhaps alone, at the beach, in high heels, calm, & no longer crying. I’m the kind of girl who calls from baths in old extravagant hotels. I think of ruined thighs. I will eat my breakfast from the pool & feel lighthearted & lovable, dive deep & touch the marbled tiles. Your new woman is Easy on the Eye, you say. I will be free. No one will ever love you like you wanted to be loved. I wish you bluebirds in the spring.

* everything written in Italics are repurposed quotes from Lucie Brock-Broido’s first book

At the doctor’s office, I anxiously list my family’s medical history to my physician. DIABETES & HIGH CHOLESTEROL, on both sides, yes… & LUNG CANCER… no, I don’t smoke anymore…. some sort of HEART ISSUES, on both sides, yes, my dad had a HEART ATTACK but didn’t die… my grandpa had a HEART ATTACK & HE DIED… DEPRESSED? well, no one ever saw a psychiatrist… I had a fallout with my therapist. no, NO! TOTALLY ORGANICALLY. She checked my heartbeat & blood pressure, & both came out slow/low, which is consistent with what A calls “the slow & steady heartbeat of a traumatized child” whenever he puts his head against my chest. I feel like a smart woman agreeing to STD tests after letting her know that I’m in a monogamous relationship. It’s like an elegant, roundabout way of saying I trust men as far as I can throw ‘em. The doctor makes me go on a scale, which I haven’t done in over a year. I ask her if I am overweight for my height & she tells me she doesn’t like the word & that my BMI is in the healthy range. I think about the video of Cardi B in court defending herself from an assault allegation. Batting her eyelashes & pouting her lips, she says she was only a hundred & thirty pounds back then, therefore couldn’t have possibly assaulted anyone. I never liked the Small & Dainty Defense, but the older I get, the more I realize how deeply embedded it is in the survival of women. Some women boss-babe their way through it, & some women take advantage of it to garner protection & sympathy. Both ways come with side effects. Stemming from my fear of having the diabetes gene & deep hatred towards my OVERWEIGHT & violent dad, I request a test for my blood sugar levels & she ends up signing me up for multiple panels. I tell the lab technician I’m not a fan of needles, & she tells me to take deep breaths, not in the hyper-ventilating way that I am. She pokes my left arm & takes what feels like buckets of blood. 15 minutes go by & she asks me to squeeze the ball & breathe slower. She tells me that my vein has given up, isn’t giving her any more blood & unfortunately, she has to poke my right arm & take some more. So I lose blood left & right, & I’m so traumatized that I leave my fly unzipped & belt unbuckled after the piss test– all the way from the bathroom to the front door of the building.

A rewards me with some bagels & I show him the symmetrical bandaids on both arms. When I arrive at work, I see a message from my doctor:

Hi Kieren Remember when you asked me about your weight being in the normal range….. I totally forgot to account for the fact that you are of Asian descent when I answered….. We actually can develop metabolic issues, like diabetes, at a lower BMI than non-Asians. So your calculated BMI of 23.9 is a tad high (…) We are already checking for the things we need to in your labs but I wanted to make sure I corrected the information I provided earlier!! (…)

I put the phone down & sit in my discomfort of not feeling the urge to throw up the bagel I had or to draft an 8-week plan to drop 40 pounds. I am actually hungry for lunch & don’t feel the urgency to restrict what I eat. For mysterious reasons at this time, I don’t desire to change, so I go the hard route today of staying exactly where I am & eating my lunch like usual. I practice loving the flawed without lying to myself that there is no flaw or promising that I will love it once I fix it. A texts me that the BMI stuff is bullshit. B texts me that they shed so much weight without even trying while in Spain.

Summer Sonnet

I am the kind of girl who would still love you,

New York, even if you decided I had only a coffin

full of words left to say. I would clutch your blade

& ask Why do you not love me back?

Remind you I’ve paid my rent & then some

for god’s sake, I let you take me from behind

as I grunted like a salmon caught between rocks

as my sweaty back glistened in the sun because

I shall not divide your sorrow by seasons

& take off when it’s too hot to breathe or

treat you like a vacation like some others do.

Not to mention I always swallow

your damp inspiration

without even making a face.

This is a poem I wrote in the summer of 2024– it received an honorable mention for the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets by the Atlanta Review. An honorable mention means this poem did not win first place. Or second place. Or third. Or fourth. Or fifth. I’m only flaunting this year-old sonnet to ease my pain, knowing I’ve not written anything at all in 75 days. Elina Kumra, who won the prize, runs a project of opiate recovery through poetry. Think about your relative intentionality & nobility, whispers my ashamed & bruised ego.

Whatever Hilary Clinton must’ve felt while having sex with Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I felt towards everything I wrote. (If Bill and Hilary indeed had sex.) What did I mean when I wrote “your damp inspiration”? As a continuum of the oral sex metaphor, I decided on an abstract object being swallowed, which encompassed the sense of sweat & heat. But as I revisit this poem, “damp” is too plain an adjective to describe New York’s summer climate, & “inspiration” doesn’t feel like a concrete enough sentiment or phenomenon derived from the season. "Your damp inspiration” does roll off the tongue just right, but why do I trust my tongue. How could Hilary trust Bill after all that crap.

In all fairness, the intermittence in my writing was far from miserable. I visited Paris for the second time & did not let a single opportunity for a glass of wine slip away. I toured through a pleasurable David Hockney retrospective, & I fell in love with my boyfriend all over again when he shyly quoted a Keats poem as we sat on a tiny island on the Seine. If only I were as sincerely terse as he is generally, I could make girls cry every now & then with my fantastic collection of memorized poetry. At the end of the day, a truly original use of language is nearly impossible to achieve, but one’s ability to convey an original experience through words that have already sort of been spoken defines a worthwhile piece of writing.

​

From a policy-making perspective, I presume it's important to differentiate all the categories of sex work, the subcategories (intercourse vs. non-intercourse, organization vs. individual, digital vs. physical, etc.), & their overlaps. I also presume the overlaps between consent & non-consent, & autonomy & heteronomy are why it's so difficult to render policies with no backlash. But within the blurry definition of sex work & what sex means to people, I am disconcerted by the transaction between money & sex. It's almost seductive how incomplex this trade can be, then I think about the time when I was in 6th grade. My mom had told me to grab some cash from her vanity cabinet to pay for my school field trip. As a working mom, she often forgot about these deadlines & what exactly she had in her cabinet. Going through all the shelves, I swatched some of her lipsticks, spritzed her perfume on my clothes, skimmed through some parenting books, & got my hands on some papers stapled & folded in between the books. On the top of the front page in bold, it said, "Sex Life Questionnaire,"​ which got me to sit down on my parents' bed & read through the whole thing with quivering curiosity. I hadn't kissed anyone or watched porn at that point & I remember distinctly a sense of desperation in this survey:

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1. Do you engage in foreplay before intercourse?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

2. Do you use a lubricant for intercourse?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

3. Do you initiate sex?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

4. Are you excited to have sex with your partner when he initiates?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

5. Do you feel safe to say no to your partner during sex?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

6. Do you experience pleasure during sex?

a) Never b) Sometimes c) Most times d) Always

​​​

Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never, throughout many questions, including the last one asking if her spouse would ever come in with her for a consultation.

​

In her neat high school teacher handwriting, she wrote that she wanted to know what she could do on her own to make sex less painful. I carefully folded the papers following their original crease, slid them back in between the books, & closed the cabinet door. As a sexually inexperienced teenager in a turbulent relationship with her mother, I felt a certain schadenfreude, guttural pity, & shame for invading her privacy. In hindsight, I don't think she ever returned the completed survey, & for the rest of my teen years, my parents remained miserable. When I brought up the possibility of a divorce, she simply listed the things she wouldn't be able to do without him: filing taxes, paying for my college education, & most of all, growing old with someone in her corner. ​& perhaps it's debatable whether my mom was raped in her marriage. She would say she wasn't. She vowed to be a wife, which means different things in different cultures & generations. He paid her bills & the children's. Like many women who choose to stay in abusive relationships, my mother, despite all her misjudgments & shortcomings, was not overall less competent or less educated than an average woman. Was my mother selling sex to my father? Did she want to do it? I believe that is debatable as well.

​

Exchange of sex & money, no matter how implicit, did happen in my parents' relationship. & I find this transaction virulent for reasons that sometimes contradict one another, but certainly because it warps the definition of dignity. Money contorts the value of abstruse things, & as much as I'd like to say that sex is only a matter of inches & minutes, I do think that sex is abstruse. So is labor. I read books & essays where sex workers described the agony of working a 9 to 5, & the relative flexibility & high pay per hour of sex work. (White women are authors of most mainstream literature on sex work.) But the dead-end 9 to 5 aside, there are indeed workplaces no less dehumanizing than a brothel. Through the trades of cash & exploited/manipulated labor, there comes a collapse in our ability to intuit what it feels like to have dignity. The feelings that distinguish safety & danger, empowerment & humiliation become untrustworthy. & I believe that when it comes to morality & humanity, what was degrading doesn't organically become enfranchising for more money. It feels that way, however, due to the system that keeps all principles & instincts negotiable at the will of currency. ​​​​​​

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My instinct is to discourage an industry that grows with the pimps & johns, with an inherent structure that is incapable of outgrowing them. But I also don't believe it's an impasse– "the oldest profession in the world" is a regressive spell, not a tradition. Some women might enjoy sex work, some policies might make a sustainable career in sex work, & someday the sex work industry might cause no harm to women. Regardless, there will be women like my mom & men like my dad.

​​​

The poet I am describing here is not Marie Howe. I clarify this because in the effort to overcome this incuriosity, detrimental to my writing, I picked up a book by Marie Howe & found this delightful poem:

​

On Men, Their Bodies

​

One penis was very large and thick so when he put it inside me I really did

say, Wow. One penis was uncircumcised, and I loved to grip the shaft and

pull down so the head popped out like a little man. One penis was curved so

I had to move in a different way. One penis was so friendly I was never afraid

of it. One penis was so slender I was startled. One penis was blunt and short

like a little pig. One penis couldn't harden until he stuffed it soft inside me.

One penis came as soon as I started to move. I'm so sorry, he said I have a

problem, but I didn't care. I loved that boy. One penis pressed against me hard

almost every morning, but I got out of bed as if I hadn't heard a word it had

said. One penis was so dear to me I kissed it even after I knew

it had been with someone else. One penis I never saw, but my hand came to

know if from the outside of his jeans. One penis loved the inside of my mouth

so much it sang, it sputtered. One had a name. One was a mouse. One, he

explained to me, had very very tiny crabs, so we couldn't have sex for a while.

One was Orthodox and wouldn't touch blood. One had a mole, a hard little

dot just under the rim. One penis was extremely patient without making a big

deal about it. One penis had a great sense of humor. One penis had herpes

but I didn't know that word yet. One was a battering ram. One was a drunk

staggering, a lout, a bully. One slept inside me, comfortably at home.​

​

​

I pushed myself to have a drink when I could, one glass of wine or two if I could handle it. I pushed myself to eat as much as I could stomach. I pushed myself to dress the way I intended to, rather than the way I feel inclined to when I feel like a wraith. I talked the way I would if I cared about the things around me, not just the sensation of my soft throat tissue being grated by gasps of dry air. The reason behind this pushing forward wasn't simply a case of FOMO, but rather an experiment of mind over body– how much pain could I tolerate in the hopes of an ultimate gain? & this gain would not be an illusive kind, unlike the relief brought by pain killers every four hours.

On our last day in Mexico, A tells me it's petty, but it's annoying that I've been breathing with my mouth open. I tell him it's because I can't breathe through my nose. He tells me my defensiveness makes it hard for him to communicate his frustrations. He asks me to have enough confidence in myself & avoid self-pity. I ask if I've been breathing loudly. He tells me I've not. I ask him why it bothers him. He says that it isn't attractive. I ask him if it's frustrating when I do unattractive things. He tells me yes. Then tells me that although he is frustrated with the lack of grace & empathy in the ways we give & receive criticism, he feels better now that we've talked. I think of what Didion said about self-respect: To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. Is this what he meant when he asked for self-confidence? To be indifferent to his words while maintaining the desire to love him as a whole? What I think of as consideration (letting go of an impermanent annoyance to avoid hurt) is to him a secret that will slowly tear our relationship down (a nondisclosure of annoyance turning into resentment over time). I stand dumbfounded, because all of this is important information for a woman to evaluate. Why is it that my grandmother endured so many attacks of ridiculous expectations & managed to bite her tongue on every single one of her husband's shortcomings, & decades later, I am tolerating a man's audacity to speak of such minor inconveniences he's experiencing? Could it be that I am dating a stupid man?

​

There is also a matter of my ego– I have to accept that I want & choose to be in a relationship with a man who is, in some areas, perplexingly stupid. The gap between his serious intelligence & emotional non-regulation is disorienting. It's a hard truth that a man who is quite perfect for me is not a perfect man at all. He needs me to tell him that some of his opinions are not worth being said, or are bad, without growing suspicious of his intentions. He needs me to tell him that his words hurt me, without holding those words hostage in an argument. Up to this point, less than a handful of conversations were enough to burn many bridges in my life, & if a past lover read this, they would perhaps think this is an unfair development. But this is the growth I intend to cradle: accepting the pain of an imperfect sentence because we're home, where we don't silence each other. Because to run away from any pain is to live a life robbed of the possibility of thriving– I've known nothing beyond survival until him.

​

At my best, I try to spend my writing time thinking about the things & people that matter to me rather than those that bother me. I try not to overcrowd my blog with heinous stories although some people might find them entertaining or relatable. Perhaps a big-time art collector taking his pants off standing between me and a Joan Mitchell painting is more entertaining than relatable, & a condescending loser repeatedly asking me if I understand American TV references is more relatable than entertaining.

​

Anyway, here's to aging gracefully & bravely. This one-year-old blog has so far received wonderfully friendly reviews & mildly surprising messages from Onlyfans creators who judged the blog by its URL & determined it a porn site. You never know what the future holds– some might say that my post about getting a full brazilian is already pornographic. & one day a hot woman's ability to give extraordinary head won't be enough to cut it in the art world & I'll have to replace my domain to one that poses a harder question.

"AR says 'When you're writing in real time you have to revise a lot.' By this I think she means that every time you try & write the truth it changes. More happens. Information constantly expands."

This is accurate in my experience because my heart isn't hermetic & shit keeps happening to it. I'm not in love the same way I was yesterday & the disorganization of it all makes me feel out of control.

​

A tells me there's a pattern to our "arguments," which feels like a finger pointed at me for looking inward first at all times. ("Arguments" because I didn't know one could argue calmly, accompanied by shared meals & sex.) I'm quick to blame myself for my feelings, shut my mouth, & leave the apartment with not much explanation. I don't wonder how annoying this can be–– I know it is. ​I write desperately in real-time but information doesn't expand much. No text, no update, no pretending like nothing happened. Just an unprovoked Icelandic artist trying to convince me that all tech bros are drug addicts & psychopaths (ungodly timing). It stings to sit in silence & recognize that I am upset with him in several ways. It's painful to admit that someone who loves me can lack consideration for me sometimes. But it's even more painful to accept that I can be hurt. That I can be so butthurt about some crude jokes, some lack of gentleness.

​

To self-soothe I eat a lot of wasabi peas & remind myself I've been generally okay despite worse things. The world expands. More happens. More difficult choices & conversations. More love. I eat even more wasabi peas & aggressively type some emails. I'm irritated by how abstruse men can be. Are they ever satisfied? Does every man believe he deserves a 10? I crack the code–– this is exactly why it's so easy for women to hate the entirety of men. The allure & specificity of one man becomes unbearably overwhelming when multiplied into a herd. But where's the fun in the life of a heterosexual girl without making exceptions?

​I had breakfast with L on Saturday & we sat in a Polish diner until 2 PM discussing her East Village co-op renovation, the price of gold, work ethic, & my co-habitant/lover as known as her son. I devoured some toast & fries & sausages & scrambled eggs that were perfectly made but took 45 minutes to be served. Going through the initial homemaking stage at a new apartment myself, I felt excitement for L's capacity to tear down walls & floors but also a grand relief that I'm not going to be doing any of that. I'm only quixotic in the sense that I believe I might be in a happy sexy relationship forever but not in the sense that I can build a happy sexy kitchen/bathroom/living room from scratch. After I parted ways with L, I walked through the rain to E's apartment in Clinton Hill to check on her cat. I painted this cat last year so I felt a responsibility to care for its well-being while E was in India. The cat was smaller than I remembered & it sat right next to me on the couch. I spilled churu on my pants but stayed & watched the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix because E was kind enough to provide amenities & I don't have a Netflix login. I didn't know that Martha Stewart actually didn't commit insider trading until I watched this documentary. & because I respect women who make it out of prison, I started following marthastewart48 on Instagram & headed back home feeling like a true girl's girl/DIY princess. I installed some shelves in the bathroom & passed out around midnight.

​

On Sunday, I vacuumed the mess I made from drilling holes in the drywall. I ordered more stuff on Amazon & felt disgusted about ordering stuff on Amazon. I hung some paintings & stretched & gesso'd 10 surfaces. L texted me if I would join her for dinner. I made my way to Williamsburg & went to a store that sells a lot of junk & felt annoyed when the cashier called me "bae" & then "boo" & then "bae" again. I bought a wooden tray & got soaked in the rain on my way to the restaurant. L ordered a cocktail & I got a glass of Italian red I'd never heard of. I wondered if I was forcing myself to believe that it could be easy like this to spend time with my boyfriend's mother or if it was actually this easy because I'm incredibly lucky somehow. We spent 3 hours just talking & eating & I got home around 9. Following asleep I wished I was dead or A was here to hold me. I had a dream that B texted me & declared they now identified as white & straight.

​​

On Monday, J came & we went out for ramen. I learned about a male hair transplant specialist in Belgium whom she met in January. We walked through the wind storm & I impulse-bought a tiny glass shelf from the hardware store. She helped me mount it on the wall & we talked for hours over some chocolate & grapes about dental care & lesbian porn. We found ourselves on opposite sides when we discussed the distances we would go for our boyfriends. I said I wouldn't move to another country or have a child for a man but would die for him if needed because love is fragile, but death is not. I explained that there are consequences once love is over but none when life is over. J seemed surprised by the lack of confidence I had in myself to deal with heartbreak. I wished she'd sleep over but she didn't & when she left I felt overwhelmed with exhaustion. I gave up on even considering making dinner & opened the packages I got from Amazon. I cursed my body for being so tired even when blessed with wonderful friendships.

​

Living in the age of Kendrick in bootcut denim & Trump presidency 2.0, plus sort of moving in with A, I feel like I'm an inch away from my mother's death, my great grandmother's resurrection, a miscarriage, & a spiritual awakening. I was a sick woman in January but no longer. I'm staying hot & I'm staying nimble– I type as I take a sip of my cold decaf coffee & check if it's time to head out for my appointment (waxing my vagina)

​

After almost 2 years of monthly brazilian I can confidently say it's better than a visit to your gyno but spreading your legs under intense overhead lighting is solid 15 minutes of discomfiture. Now that I reside in Bushwick I have to try a new wax center & say goodbye to my Bedstuy waxer who has heard about all my foreign & domestic travels. My new waxer H is nice & we don't talk much at all. I tip the same amount I always tip & wonder if I should've tipped my former waxer more since she had to listen to my takes on Canadian McFlurry & was kind enough to share her takes on bars in Boston.

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With Valentine's day looming, I'm in a curious & girly spirit, ankle-deep in the slutty side of substack. & I still don't have a grasp on how to style my hair since the haircut & look rather exceptionable but my forearms are getting kinda huge & butch.

​

I search for a bedside table for A's new apartment but this man is receptive yet aesthetically ambiguous & hard to please so I feel a little testy. I go on Wayfair's nightstand category & list products price high to low because I cannot gauge his taste otherwise. But after seeing the most hideous 25k-a-pop nightstand I quickly switch the setting & scroll until my eyes feel so blinded by all the déclassé furniture. Why do humans need so much shit in the house to live. I can talk about why a small dot in the corner of a painting ruins the whole picture but cannot articulate why a certain coffee table looks gauche or a carpet looks nuts. It drives me insane that I cannot clearly explain why something is good or bad. I wish anyone would just believe me when I say it looks awful. How does one achieve such magisterial status