& O, bright star of disaster, I have been lit. after Lo Kwa Mei-En
i have come & come here a thousand times, gone by many names. trust: i am no god,
only woodworm, only termite burrowing like a light in the flesh. i am no insect,
only an ache on loop in the window. be honest. the wounds have been bearable
thus far. & who isn't bruised around the edges, peaches poured into the truckbed, receipts
faded to white? i have only ever wanted to bite down hard on whatever was offered to my hot,
grasping mouth. & here i am, licking corners like a nervous cat, squirming in the hallway
outside the bathroom. i pick up the accent of whoever i'm speaking to. nobody wants
to fuck a sponge. nobody wants to crush on a ghost. o sure, we all do it anyway:
flickering screen; falsies batting; a story of a story of a girl, or country, or a clean house
where everyone knows her place. my face is a game of telephone gone sour, or south.
fleshy marionette in the window, dancing her awful, crooked dance. & isn't that
what you paid for? isn't that what you came to see? a god, on loop, failing?
204 The Paris-American
Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, the Poetry Review, Indiana Review, and others. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.