Christine Kwon

When your month is lonely…
The walk is lovely
but you won’t walk it
the ground wet as eyelashes
the fronds dripping steady streams
water tapping the fountain
frogs chirping
it strikes your heart with fear
the night gathering as a pool in the trees
along the fence
the sun small and pink and dying in the distance
behind some stupid houses
and though you could call someone
it may be worse—
you’d have to entertain,
take out the cheese and wine
say something clever
maybe you should just stay with the night
find just one insect outside
and follow it
tonight I found a brown moth
with yellow eyes like an owl
opening and closing
not particularly lustrous
like a grandmother’s dress
a black line running through the hem
skirting the floor
for a few days I was afraid of my damp
feet on the wood after pacing the night
like a lantern my body
remembered I had to train myself
to remember nothing was happening
I was not unmoored
I could be so sensible
and night so easy—

It’s so hot the swamp is rotting.
Why have all the swan boats not flown away?
Why are the white herons not flying wherever they go to desert us.
Forget script, the children don’t know their last names.
They take up the whole page as if the universe is pulling them apart.
After the parade the son of a cop ran down nine bikers.
I walked past their bodies on the ground.
That same season a woman was severed in half.
She was picking up beads thrown from a masked rider.
The bedsheet the cops tented over her quickly bloomed red.

No more spring or fall.
There are two seasons now.
Red flames or blue flames, hot or icy hot.
Why do the hairless squirrels chase one another up the tree?
Soon, no more acorns, flowers, bees.
I stopped a child from stamping out a caterpillar.
There will be nothing to eat up your body when you’re dead, I said.
The only thing worse than rotting is not rotting.
No hole for the soul to escape from.
I’m the best kind of teacher.

Ah, just bring us the beignets and frozen coffees and syrupy ice.
What matter if our eyes and feet and hands rot still attached.
If our feet crystallize white dust like ubersweet fruit.
It’s not like we go for a walk.
Let’s stay home and grade the students’ papers.
They don’t know left from right or how to tie their shoes.
When they grow up they want to be viral stars.
Maybe they will sprout tentacles where their hands and feet used to be.
And the shoe industry will boom.
And we will only see what’s visible in blue light.

No one has children anymore anyway.
There’s no one left to teach them.
All the teachers have perished under the bridges.
The mayor moved their tents from the park.
When they approach my car, I fiddle with the radio.
Refugee children in Sweden have fallen into comas and won’t wake up.
They’re perfectly healthy otherwise, sleeping beauties waiting.
Once their parents gain citizenship they wake up and go to school.
What a terrible dream, they say, blinking like goldfish.
I’m in such a state I’m planning on being absent, absent, absent.

Tawdry bodegas.
Fake furniture because no one owns it yet.
Meters running up.
Ironwork! Fur, Majolica, fur, hat. Glass. Person.
The local estuary, open at 9:00 a.m.
A beautiful person.
I feel a fruit growing inside my chest.
Big and soft, but with seeds.
Gorgeous names: Isidore, Azealia, Clyde, Ulysses,
Lafayette. Evening’s falling to
blue wet realms of trees.
Leafy nothing. Winds ring the bells.
Your name appears in my mouth
and I feel a little cold. Lovers, a bystander in plaid.

Christine Kwon lives in New Orleans. Her first book, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue (2023), won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize.