content warnings
sexual references, violence, graphic imagery
[248 words]
1
The writing on the wall:
a splash of incendiary slugs
and a floral pattern of blood,
a mural of amoebas
in jagged dots, like the pebbles of ice
lodged in the gills
of market fish.
2
Impasto flesh, informal art;
somehow you know
the direction of a stroke
by the colors’
diminishing countershade,
how a symbol
is generated
from an elaborated thought
about a parodic god
and his tablet of prohibitions.
3
Don’t ask me when,
but once I witnessed
the bisection of a penis,
slit down the oval edges
of its smiling meatus.
4
The notion of a happy hour
is unusual,
but you want to be inhabited
by an old haunt,
a spotted seal
camouflaged
in an orca’s foggy bowel,
like a half-naked fakir
you make that fire-walk.
5
There is a sex cult in the park
devoted to the tangible;
there you can
undress a grape,
eat apple crescents
and orange segments,
and spit the pips
and mesocarp.
6
They will not let you live;
the eye of a needle
blinks as you pass through.
Sever a chicken’s head
and watch its body
beat flightless wings
with futile intensity.
They will not let you live;
dragged on the ground
like a pig’s potbelly;
the noise of a clam’s shell
bashed violently against a rock
resisting the urge
to be opened and eaten.
Unable to make it out
or new – lie down,
the foragers
will not snout.
You don’t have to
play dead any longer.
Jimmy Saekki was born in Seoul, South Korea. An American citizen, he has been an expatriate for nearly two decades, living in various places across Europe and Asia. His poems have appeared in Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology and Commentary.
