ENDLESSLY HUMAN.

the harder i swim, the faster i sink

[ivyburied]

graduation’s a long fucking way away and you’re close to losing your mind. the colors widow themselves so brightly it’s unreal. it’s may and still cold. it’s may and you’re about to fail out of the advanced math you convinced yourself you could take. going mad in the back of english class, waiting for the sky to split open into a thousand singing angels, into a soft-clench muscle poured out like cloth, 3pm, trying to analyze the static in your head. no metaphors, no light. the moon pounds like a heart, or a thing expected to be.

ode to plath, the wonder years’ no closer to heaven, 4am exam season

[risingphoenixpress-deactivated2]

stranger alchemies By Eunice Kim

stranger alchemies By Eunice Kim

stranger alchemies

the both of us animal-soft in a derelict parking lot. 5:14am & the radio spits static. coming down at the end of the night, it’s an afterparty, a sickening sort of voyeurism. it’s all the scenes from those coming-of-age movies where the camera pans out & afterwards you understand everything beyond comprehension. but now it’s just us & the smallest god we know—nothing to see…

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[ivyburied]

trying to say hello to the nosebleed summer like it doesn’t hurt, like i am not filled to the brim with sun, too much of it to catch in my hands. sleeping sickness salts me with its unthinkably rusted embrace. i want so badly that i am willing to beg: raspberry hearts, slate-colored monsoon, the choking green that happened overnight. again and again, i walk down the steps to the stained-moss water. each morning, we tidy the kitchen light and skin the chalk off the sidewalk and find new ways to run out of hours. 

[ivyburied]

nitrogen sky on fire, heaving under the significance of lungs, drawing out this pain inside myself in body-shaped pieces. mosquito-bite summer is splitting the horizon and i have never wanted anything more than to enjoy it. this house aches for a mouth i can slant into mine. want to go back to december 2019 where i had chicken pox for three weeks and it itched like skinned knees, like flares of light. sour lemonade by the glass, blue blankets for the 5pm sunset, childhood toys scrawled around me. the nights were long, then, but at least they were complete. i waited so long for these scabs to fix themselves. december 2019 where i was still sleeping and dreaming ultraviolet and sitting in the hospital waiting room breathing in recycled air. april feels like it’s going to outlive me, one sickness replaced by another.

— elegy for the cold air [ journal // april 19, 2020 ] 

[ivyburied]

i’m stealing april into beneath my wrists, making room in this kitchen for a you and a me. the wound hasn’t salted over yet, but we’ll make it work. visible light, careless on the countertops, summer swinging past the childhood playgrounds, cornflowers wilting in the sunrise. sometimes i think this is it: this warm teething-buzz, this crime of tenderness. our handprints over the front door. handfuls and handfuls of freckles. pass the sugar, please, meaning, i adore you.

— blind spot | e.k.

[ivyburied]

heresy [ journal // april 15, 2020 ] 

[ivyburied]

april swing-dances around me [ journal // april 14, 2020 ]

[tonguetiedmag]

lit: in trying to quantify the sickness

violet dreams, fluorescent ones / my inheritance no longer wants me in its bed. & the sleeping animal of the city is waking up, slow with blueshift. i’m going back to that place again: the cinnamon-morphine one / the landscape i don’t own. i wrap up my body & press return to sender, i live between hospital shifts—sharply static, radioactive. i want to forget about the gunshot that loved me. spring comes & the hemorrhaged pain of this body stays. the heart as a cemetery / the heart as a foreign object / myself as counterfeited. girl gone missing / gone blurry around nightfall. & still i hunger inadequately, in slices.

by: Eunice Kim 

[ivyburied]

the sunrise bristles with grief when you are on the other side of it. my body, an oral history of fear. i stay up the entire night maddened. didn’t mean to but i’m holy now. & oh how blue and rounded the morning sun is. how wide light can be when it chooses to. i’m feeling chemical-high, chemical highway. nails buzzing my scalp. started conflating love with violence again, that monster in the walls. my body & its fear. how quick we are run back to what hurt us & demand its redemption.

산소 [ journal // april 5, 2020 ]

[ivyburied]

i miss four weeks of school & eat cold pasta while conference calling my friends. i stop going out. the weather textures itself with spring & i gasp myself awake, throat knitting over the silence. the law of conservation of matter says that we are not created or destroyed. there is a canary in my ribcage & i assume it will outlast me in this universe or any other. i write a paper on queerness. i fail to study physics. chaos theory says we are going nowhere, so instead i wait for the world to tilt back onto its axis.

— lithium-colored spring | e.k.

[ivyburied]

self-portrait with illness  [ journal // march 24, 2020 ]

[ivyburied]

eunice, i really like your writing and your choice of word and imagery. :)

thank you! <3

[ivyburied]

the sunrise is burnished today & yet there is not a single gasp of light in the sky. i’m pulling off the wrong exit ramp on the highway. when lorde said: maybe this is the party—maybe this is all there is to it, the empty room pigeonholed inside of you & the trauma of it, dressed up under the strobe lights. i suppose i wanted the boy to kill me in the shed with the radio-static lanterns. it doesn’t matter now. maybe this is the party.

[ivyburied]

antebellum | e.k.

[ originally published in royal rose magazine ]

[ivyburied]

polaris sings me to sleep, anesthesia-soft. this is the the second poem in two days i have written about breathing. an elegy to the outline of my lungs. an elegy for the imperfect shape they keep, the oxygen riddling my veins. i spend my nighttimes on a loop, pretending this home is a cathedral and this room an offering. i remake myself until i am ugly with the caesarean scar of it. this purple-pale winter where i did not own my body, where i tried to kill myself, where i almost wrote a note about the bell jar that keeps me listless.

interlude: i stop waking up on time. i go out for iced coffee in half-hour increments. i keep writing poems full of lists like they mean something. i sleep between classes and miss two deadlines and am asked to be okay. i listen to julien baker on repeat. i forget to wash the dishes. i wait. i miss the graceless summer, how the highs were higher and the lows fluorescent. i tell myself something needs to change and it might as well be me. i feel relief when it hurts to breathe. mostly, i am indeterminable.

the body’s grief is apocryphal, a phantom pain. winter loosens its grip on me but i am still only measured into this same piecemeal shape again. look at me, the mirror screams. and i do, i look at the afterimages and the hands flying away like seasons, like birds on the telephone wire, and i am wondering why the sun is slipping into an autopsy so soon, why the light has never made an imprint that mattered, why i cannot bear to brush my hair and stand upright like the static in my head will quiet long enough for me to do so—

i spend a handful of change on an energy drink and a space at the local cafe. nothing happens to tell the world that i did not die.

— vantage point from behind the highway lights | e.k.

[ivyburied]

polaris sings me to sleep, anesthesia-soft. this is the the second poem in two days i have written about breathing. an elegy to the outline of my lungs. an elegy for the imperfect shape they keep, the oxygen riddling my veins. i spend my nighttimes on a loop, pretending this home is a cathedral and this room an offering. i remake myself until i am ugly with the caesarean scar of it. this purple-pale winter where i did not own my body, where i tried to kill myself, where i almost wrote a note about the bell jar that keeps me listless.

interlude: i stop waking up on time. i go out for iced coffee in half-hour increments. i keep writing poems full of lists like they mean something. i sleep between classes and miss two deadlines and am asked to be okay. i listen to julien baker on repeat. i forget to wash the dishes. i wait. i miss the graceless summer, how the highs were higher and the lows fluorescent. i tell myself something needs to change and it might as well be me. i feel relief when it hurts to breathe. mostly, i am indeterminable.

the body’s grief is apocryphal, a phantom pain. winter loosens its grip on me but i am still only measured into this same piecemeal shape again. look at me, the mirror screams. and i do, i look at the afterimages and the hands flying away like seasons, like birds on the telephone wire, and i am wondering why the sun is slipping into an autopsy so soon, why the light has never made an imprint that mattered, why i cannot bear to brush my hair and stand upright like the static in my head will quiet long enough for me to do so—

i spend a handful of change on an energy drink and a space at the local cafe. nothing happens to tell the world that i did not die.

— vantage point from behind the highway lights | e.k.

[ivyburied]

elevator music on repeat stagnant in my head. in this poem i dead-end my own recovery & nap during the day & catalogue the misfirings of my neurons. every so often, i have to check myself for phantom pains as if my limbs would dislocate themselves after the ache of leaving. i cut the headlights & apologize to the roadkill after i hit it. the blacktop rolls its tongue beneath the curb. when next to normal said: & you find some way to survive. i take the unendurable & forgive it for what it does not mean to do. i think once you learn how to be sad you can never unlearn it.

— 6:37PM, SUNSET | e.k.