I tried to touch myself
in the hotel room
when the bar closed
before I’d had enough,
while, on the news
stations I never watch because
everyone talks too loud
and doesn’t seem all that
bothered by the state
of things, everyone
was giving up
hope of a brand I’d
never cared much for
anyway, wanting to be cold-
blooded and over all that
hopey-changey stuff,
wanting not to believe
in a broken thing, broken
on purpose, I know, to keep
my loved ones drowning
or dead. I wasn’t numb
exactly, under the covers, naked,
touching the linoleum sheets
with all of my skin, everything
close and far away at once,
like my labia were on the other side
of a glass door, my clitoris dull-
eyed and dumb when I asked
for proof I was an animal
that would still wriggle
when prodded. I guess
it’s an old question:
is there anything that works
that isn’t a machine for killing,
or doomed to collapse, or stolen
from the sweat of the hungry?
Maybe my body was all three,
there, in the hotel room,
liquor-shot and reaching
in every direction
for an answer,
a complete sentence, or,
if nothing else, an exit,
a view, at least, of what
waits on the other side
of despair, but my pussy
that night was playing the part
of another wall, another sky
to trace and trace with no
response, another blank
beast whose name we’ve
long forgotten, or who dies
in a day. All this is to say
I didn’t even get close.
I called and called
and nothing came.
I had a body, and
it refused to rise for work.
To sing for the new
old country, to sing
so I could weep and feel
a little clean. So I
uncurled my wrists, pulled
the darkness over
my head, and slept
like a rock, or a man
that’s dead.
Franny Choi is the author of collection Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.) She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan, founder of the Brew & Forge Book Fair, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.