postmortem for chaos theory
here i am, thinking about the summer
collapsed around you. the leonine
days, the sullen nights. my body a
cascading series of monsoons.
i watch as you dismember me. my wrists wrung
from my hands and each rib carefully pendent
on the ceiling. the wreck
-age of light strewn around myself,
my leftovered body. the heatwave
breaks unevenly
this year. so it’s summer, it’s
salvageable, and i am
thinking about quantum mechanics. the
uncertainty of it all, the truth that there is
a universe where
we learn to float. where the
horizon isn’t wide enough, and
we chew up the syllables like goldenrod.
like
desire.
so now we’ve widowed the lip of the
change and i am still searching
for you in the breath-smothered glass,
in
the digital glow of the beautiful night.
i am a violet-shaped wound, but
dimly. by the smallest margin.
and already the body grieves,
apocryphal. the laws of physics break
down
the universe into body-sized pieces—
the kind our hands can
bear to hold.
Eunice Kim is a Korean-American writer living in Seoul. Her work has been published in Polyphony, The Heritage Review, Vagabond City Lit, and more. She currently works as a staff reader for The Adroit Journal and a volunteer writer for Her Culture.