The Traveller
WRITTEN BY YEJIN SUH
What is the opposite of decapitation?
A truck head turning into an intersection,
bodyless. My father told me, smokers
are the worst types of addicts. They drain and suck
until their bone-dry lips shrivel to nothing,
shrivel to certain pieces, star bits and acrid crumbles.
Behind my eyelids unfurl white vapor
escaping his lips in morsels of soft smoke conjunction.
I watched him through the Belt of Venus
between my shutter blinds, half-way closed,
slicing in alternating shades of white. I couldn’t
see his face. I remember learning grief in five stages,
which stumps me since people have died
for grief, fought brothers and sisters,
tore raw screams for it, spiraled long novels
in search of it, made love, tasted metallic
against their teeth, cut hair, whored themselves out,
meditated, dipped in cold wonderlands.
If in five stages I remain at the inception
of the first. To blink enough times
is to pay homage to a fleeting world.