JENNIFER SOONG
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Is Speaking This Can't Be All |
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Every sad architecture contains a house-moon self. When I raise your hand I want to know who’s asking. This is Step One I acquired in hindsight. You stare with your noise-cancelling eyes. A zipper of blackbirds sews the far end of the field. Can guilt be sold? There’s too much to buy back. What of handing things over, what of mute children and born again innocence? Under the FDA sky-light America and Horace, every question from the beginning ever flown, flies: How, what time, does my love go where and what is near |
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where and what is near God is one way of composing an answer against itself. The current shifts to maintain its yesteryear. The blind contour drawing lines up with what you see what can’t be. As a kid did you mean what you are going to? Next to this it’s
whom you want / how to wake at all But turn your back to the turnpike, tune in to the Pacific's fantasia. There’s summation of wind, contact, and surface. The sole rower oars his motorboat backwards, irons water through the mind’s vault, lost times of your sentiment. The feeling, not unique, is indistinguishable from itself: what it is that’s doing it, in which way, and what it was you ever thought would happen in the first place |
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it’s my head obscuring what I want to see. In the puddle you-I-&-me disorders multiplicity, evaporates
into a thought: What do you think? The last first love crumbles like multi-gendered lusciousness gazed down a wall. For a year we exchanged secrets in a cubby. Back-sliding doodles. Some fear. The piling of notes, then more fear, to keep the love company |
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A miasma of dubiety, autumn starts to get you down. Thinking it’s what you wanted, you’re compelled to gauge personal accuracy. Step outside. A friend tooth-picks through the leaves. Do you understand? I’ve got to get home. When the candle starts to tunnel, you let the wax stay. A canyon of softness so removable it’s the idea of a nest. The impasse works up, then burns the rain. You can use my body you say. You can write this up, dance, or a cottage from the ground
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JENNIFER SOONG is a New Jersey and New York-based poet. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and is currently an English doctoral candidate at Princeton University, where she studies modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with additional interests in guilt/shame, aesthetics, and Marxist theory. Her most recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Queen Mob's Teahouse, and Prelude Magazine. She is also the poetry editor at Nat. Brut.
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