Noelle Paek
I never understood how the body needs a
beating
to feel alive.
Pain blesses with pleasure
hammered meat tastes the best
and god likes his children tender
before they’re delivered to heaven.
My grandmother made me her masseuse before I could
question the peace on her face as I pressed
young thumbs into old muscle,
pushed her into her stone bed with welts
that shone into russet streaks.
A little bit of killing makes the body stronger.
She taught me how to hop my fingers
down each side of her spine,
wring the hours swatting
on the floor bathing cabbage
in salt
out of her draping skin.
You honor your elders with a tithe of pain.
Stand on me Jinsuh.
I crushed her best I could with a kid’s shoe size
dancing on a crooked stage.
Hit me hard.
Her back my rocking horse
as I straddled her, fists pounding
to the rhythm of her gallop.
I’d always finish with raking fingernails
and sweeping rubs
as if to erase
the pink raised rows of tilled skin on white backdrop
that abused her into sleep.
They say grass withers. Flowers fade.
If we bury her under her garden
she could feed us forever.
Would the peppers sweeten with her blood,
the snap of bitten cucumber become breaking of bone?
Farm fresh is to die for good.
Now what right do I have to be horrified
as a voyeur of my future self
my own flesh and blood decaying in my presence
a premonition of my own death.
I imagine standing
on her with my current feet.
How her back would cave beneath me.
How one step would make me a murderer.
With gravedigger's hands
I feel the skull behind
her face,
root past snow-capped widow’s peak
through artificial curls.
Not too hard just rubbing
my grandmother says
but what is rubbing if not a reassurance
between two skins that they exist.
Because movement is life.
Because we both need to know it’s still there.
My sticky palms move over her like clouds,
the thunderstorms outside us
that are god’s condolences,
his apology for keeping her 10-feet-away garden out of reach.
Boom.
You’re in my prayers.
Boom.
At least her plants won’t die too.
Long strokes pare down the curve of pale calf
and now I know why
they tell you not to get tattoos.
It’s not because age ruins art
but because it
creates
it,
time stabbing blood blue ink into varicose veins.
A fine line print under almost see-through skin.
Her IV drip was really a stick-and-poke
to get that deep dye back.
She’s got dye scribbled all over her legs.
My legs are on either side of her
freshly razed with bug bite braille
that spell out I’m sorry but I can’t stand being here
here in the body of my childhood summers
here above my mother’s genesis
a still prey beneath me,
too gone to enjoy the fight.