A Beautiful Machine
Tonight I am cratered in an East Coast summer so heavy it sticks to my chin like molasses. An all-American, neo-Western stargirl winks at me from her palace on the dive bar sign forty feet high. The sight of her glittering teeth molds to my shoulder. I swear, they’re growing a new set beneath my flesh, molars spreading everywhere, heat bridging across my throat like a beautiful machine. My heat making a beautiful machine. This white man, more wrinkled than the napkin in his hand, asks me how I could be so pretty for an Asian girl. I’ve gone Oriental before, you could be my new favorite. I think of roadkill by the highway next to the bar, or whatever makes this country happy, like a lone hunter holding his rifle up to the sky, begging it to open up for once. Open up, pretty girl. Tell me where you’re really from. I can be just as American. I can be his mechanical ragdoll pressed against the mini Bible in his banged-up Ford T. I can show him my robot body on the way to the next gas station and bash it open with his pocket knife and all that would come out is grease, parts. Under all that steel lies my animal heart, beating, beating, human insides steaming on the backseat, gushing on beat to the drum of a readily fired semi-automatic gun. Drive me, mister. Jesus, just take the damn wheel. I’ll soothe myself with the noise of birds that get shot midair, their wings paralyzed in motion, noisy all the way down. Let all the roadkill be rain, lining the overpass as if it were a wedding aisle, the same way this country makes bodies pile for empire. Start revving, mister. Then accelerate. I tell the man we smell of gasoline. The hunter fills me up with gunpowder, saying he’ll make me into a little dove and fashion these alien arms with metal feathers. I can wage American war, spill American blood. I can be as American as a car on the freeway. Amen, babygirl, the hunter says to me. I’m blinded by his phone flash on the operating table. I squint and I am conscious of it. Like a wild creature caught in headlights. Like a man watching hardcore pornography. Eyes that drown in some type of artificial glow. After he’s finished, he puts on the radio. Fresh oil starts leaking out of my ears. The announcer talks about 4th of July deals and the best ways to pick up women, celebrity divorces, road closures. He says you’re the image of freedom; I just listen.
Angelina Luo is an Asian-American poet living in Massachusetts with a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Central themes of their writing include identity, queerness/lesbian love, the body and body horror, and suburban surrealism. Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Same Faces Collective, and Jabberwocky. They also say: to a free Palestine, and for all people undergoing oppression to liberate themselves from occupation and imperialism.