by Christina Im
The summer you turn me to cream and gold dust, I scare myself
into my skin. I don’t mean to end the world, just show you
how dangerous it is. I rattle around inside the last true story
about us. I’m fifteen. A city that falls in slow motion.
The only verb in this story is want and the only solution
is to keep on walking. You know what they say about me
because you said it first. My hands are just a dead language
pulled like wire over craters, craters. I need every word
to feel like the last. Why did I leave? Why can’t I
keep leaving? To win any argument about love,
I have to whittle us down to your level. Photographs
where my eyes are closed. Rain that could make your hair
fall out. Pick tiny things out of this huge catastrophe brain.
No one said they have to belong to me. This is a film
that could go on forever: every revelation you’ve planned for us
is the blunt edge of something else. For the past five years
I’ve been trying to make something happen. You’ve been trying
to make me into a principle you can actually defend. By now
I thought I’d be finished paying full price for my own extinction,
but you’re still here, voice of a goddess convincing herself
she’s a goddess, and I need to know that someone saw.
To love someone is to invite them out to the massacre.
To be loved back is to know that they looked away
and smiled. This is a film that goes on forever: memories
are just rooms filled with things you stole and I returned.
I have no control over what happens here. I can only tell you about it.
Christina Im is a Korean American writer and undergraduate student at Princeton University. A 2018 finalist for Best of the Net, she has been recognized for her work by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Adroit Prize for Poetry, Hollins University, Bennington College, and the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. Her poem "Meanwhile in America" was selected by Natalie Diaz for inclusion in Best New Poets 2017.