art by Stefanie Becker

by Georgia San-Li

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            Peckish she pecks to find Beauty

                        her Romanesque nose

                        her Helen

            Infusing Her with her soul

                        her clay long-fingered hands, her hips in

            such grinding agony, endured

            to form and wrench his children,

            with her power of catastrophe over

                        that object

                        that creature

                        that enemy

                        that human life

containing the workings of

her organs

her plasma

her monster

the umbilical cord of

            her two daughters, then

            her son

            her duty done and

severed, untied

set free, still hungering, Beauty remained

unsatisfied, full of bitter accusations

 

Nighttime

 

When Mijo comes downstairs, she will be in the mood to listen to my stories. Ba – ba-pa-pa, Ba ba-pa-pa. The New World Symphony was still playing. He imagined she would turn on the water pot for coffee, she would come to the family room and kiss him on the cheek, open the window blinds. It remains too early for the daylight. Pull up the chair, he would say.

He heard her in his imagination: Let me make you some toast, a cup of coffee. He could smell the toast his daughter Mijo brought on a tray, tasted the tart strawberry jam.

Listening to the cheery birds outside, she would search for something to say. Will you be calling your chums today?

We are brothers, he would tell her, and she would write in her journal, her pencil scratching madly at paper as though that would work to change things –

When I was twenty years old, we were chums, like bear cubs who had grown up together, tumbling through the countryside, its pine groves, and fields of grass. We had that same scent, I would say, rubbing my thumb against my fingers, in front of my nose like this – taking a sniff.

In college, we met at a coffee shop after lectures. We listened to Dvorak, each dreaming about the woman we would marry. Who would she be? This symphonic sound of trains coursed into the future, carrying our voices and laughter between gulps of coffee as the steaming monsoon rains fell over the city and showered the streets. We were hot- blooded, pulsations rumbling through our pristine bodies, tuned, whole, sculpted by military training. Some of us air force, others army. We ignored the rubble, broken walls along the north palace gate, the coal trucks, the reek of gasoline and rubber — all our boyhood faces — I can see them so clearly, smeared in soot and smote by war. We studied to chase the future, our substitute for combat and shrapnel that tore through our brothers. We were philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, poets, and read Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann. One of our friends, a genius, read Tolstoy — in Russian! If we felt fervent, clamoring to reach higher, the stars, the moon, we were light- hearted with joy shimmering across the roses of our cheeks. Our souls flew. We were so confident, conclusive, that each of us would find her — she was there, within our reach. My brothers, those of us who are left, we still reminisce as if this were never in doubt. Looking up at this ceiling I charted their location, traversing, as if we had lived for hundreds of years. One in Chicago, one in Seoul, one in Madison, one in Seattle – the one in Denmark, he had met with Jeni in Copenhagen before she married Juno, treating her like a daughter. I have not heard from him for a while. He must have died. I lost track of time in my life. Uniting with them in my recollections, visiting them like this, I can go there, ride the train to a magic mountain before coming home. Before the music stopped.

 

He listened to the hoot of trains fading away before he pulled off the headphones. He left his chums in the mountains.

Chella had turned on the kitchen faucet, let the water beat down into a hollow kettle. Hard rain, rattling like a saber: what have you done with all your life?

The ticker for the gas switch sputtered frantically.

She turned it off, then tried again.

When the house turned quiet, he called out to her.

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