[My Bad] Singing to Your Healing Panty Line

—inspired by a painting of Mee Kyung Shim

These are words you’ll not hear,

won’t make you duck when bilabials bounce,

ricochet their hollow points off tight skin

of eardrum, or locate the droning thrum

of your red longing; there’s a moment

maturing, right of your scarred

abdomen; once, you named five quadrants to love—

held potential for three thousand off-spring—we have so

much clutter to reassess; still, you recess,

thinking, I can still have it all,

longing and not accepting the lost screams

of babies, like rhythmic dissidence in Ella’s

scatting—there’s a hurt in the beauty

of artistry. The abacus of your years turn into grains

of high yellow sand, yet you are dark inside:

trinkets so small so insidious so condescending live

between the cracks of toes like home-

less under viaducts. What is burgundy in

you is not you, it is a moment twisting—

a merry-go-round filled with lifeless, popeyed,

salmon who can’t swim, who once waited for

your stream to push them out your enclosed four

walls. These salmon confiscated for their

attraction live on spears called poles: piston fish for

longitude and latitude, and we are all here healing

(you more than I) praying to be connected again,

but I know nothing about you and this

abruption. I’ve failed here. Can do what? I am hindrance

to you, like the dark salmon with dead, yellow,

eyes dangling inside your hallowed out harpsichord.