FIONA JIN
cw – suicidal ideation
someday i’ll throw fiona jin off a building
after Ocean Vuong / after Frank O’Hara / after Roger Reeves
*note: this is a contrapuntal poem, which means it can be read as 1) two separate poems, 2) down the left section, then the right, or 3) straight across the page.*
Lately, this is only my least violent death. Mind revolving
like a pistol, everything I touch lessening
to lead. I imagine knuckles as pennies rolling across pavement,
moonlit streets like slackening arms. Swallowed by
this maw of a city, its electric teeth threading gold through
a funeral veil of hair. In that story I am
an honorable burial. In this poem, we’ve descended
so far below the city we’re not even worthy of death
. Blackened sewage gurgling through this ancient skeleton
of pipes that won’t take blood as rust but
spit out your convulsing body of filth. & I ask you
what is demonic? Your favorite rain jacket rippling
like metal in the absence of rain. Come sit with me
on the hotel roof, thinning wind so raw it shivers
. You, who learned jīn as danger, as the quivering tip of
a knife. Here is a secret: for all of my blades,
I am scared of death, of what might leak out. Here,
I shall give you another: underneath my trembling,
this machine of flesh & bone & bruise has gone cold. Fiona,
I—you—take these hands that are dusty fireworks & see
I won’t throw you over the railing because I can’t & never could.
How in our veins, the streetlights are free-falling.
Bite these words like ice cubes, won’t you—tell me this
Like a fighting chance: say someday I’ll love Fiona Jin.
cw – violence
finul eligee for my ded dear
after Ran Zhao
Eons after we have remade the United States
a Poet-ocracy, I open my phone with Mother-
Tongue ID & my wifi symbol
is a Dear. Safari app metaphored & machine-
gunned to just
one Dear. Our savior, this Deth of Innusence
easy & instant as ramen: in the Poet-ocracy,
all Asian Supermarkets
are now class-A worship sites; Daughters,
class B. Today at church we kneeled
on Mouths hard as knees, spoke in bruised
Confeshunul Pomes. The Thisawrus is the holy
text & today, I mishear worship as workshop,
you accusing me of attempting Godhood & tackling
me at the stomach. Abecedarians
spinning, halving in my periphery. The pastor
continues on, says in other news, K-Ming Chang
has been elected President & YoungArts prizes
will be paid in Bodies this year & aren’t we all guilty
of Plagiarizing God. My God, the Ded Dear
in my stomach is swirling, is so Ded that
you Kill it again: my Thesaurus regurgitating
to make Word Salad with the Cut Fruit of
your eyes: the curve of your stainless steel.
Its reflection of quivering Venison.
In the Poet-ocracy you have Won every Body known to poet-kind.
In the Poet-ocracy you have exploited anything you could not kill.
Fiona Jin is a writer in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Her work is in or forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Rust & Moth, and GASHER Press. She is currently a Junior Editor for Sine Theta Magazine.