lionchai

poetry • gold on burning skin

[lionchai]

nefer

enter drenched in perfume

that cleopatra supposedly wore

in the era before christ.

myrrh, amyris, and ginger in city hall.

tangerine and nutmeg, outside the gates

of our institution for democracy.

a half empty coffee cup, a green scarf, too bright 

for a city dampened by pinstripe suits.

what would julius caesar have to say

about appeals to be seen as human

and the performance of testimonies

and disappearances and kidnappings

and a secret police?

resin, narcissisus, black pepper

legs crossed on a folded chair

the councilmembers shake their heads

the moral condemnation empties 

into the chalice of microphones.

stoic, silent, microphones. amplifying

signals to an absent god.

caraway, coriander, sandalwood.

incense curls 

there is no one to shake our fists at

the world's most powerful man is an empty chair.

at the temple of justice, we introduce our legal names

recite our acceptable lines

the buzzer goes off, the three minutes are up

cleopatra defers the remainder

to written testimony you can submit in 72 hours

(you can scan the link on the QR code)

we have said all we could say in the allotted time.

away the sails, drenched in rose water.

away the security check points, identification cards, 

our emptied pockets.

we are mute even as we declare to speak for the voiceless.

as we sit on our plastic folding chairs,

the voices flood the streets, piling up outside city hall’s doors

like a battering ram. 

"we will not be silenced" falls flat in a room tiled with carpet.

coffee oil, cardamom, amber. 

after christ, fragrance disappears 

into twenty nine degrees. 

winter bites at the bare skin 

coats and civilization don’t cover.

file for permission first, before you speak. 

indifferent skies, civic duty crossed off the list.

[lionchai]

all I know is that I want, and I want fiercely.

kindness, bravery, dreams-

to spill open and be full of light, something shining lunar warm and gold. for my heart to leak out my dreams and blossom like a fishing net over the sky. to have my atoms diffuse across the continents so no one would feel lonely again.

for whatever trace I leave on this earth to be an afterglow. I want to be where the atlantic and pacific gently touch, to fold the edges of the universe together, to make the isolated connect and make sense again.

I want to know, where do the oceans meet?

[lionchai]

I. we sat in the library aisles, pulling books on the rise and fall of the roman empire from the shelves. they fell like gladiators in a fever dream. we pinned an atlas on the wall and mapped conspiracy theories. that summer, we spoke the secret language of birds. you tried to teach me arabic once and the words were saffron on your tongue.

II. there is no temple at persepolis. there, they built burial chambers to look like palaces. here, the coronation of kings were held. your eyes like two capitals, twin hearts of the empire; your arteries, the city roads reaching its furthest corners.

III. you told me how they conquered the desert, and your eyes glowed as your hands shaped arrows in the air.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

your daughter is a rain rabbit and clear winter skies, unanchored with a fierce yearning. she is wings unfurling and atlantic waves breaking onto the shore. she loves the heat and curses when she cooks, and finds poetry in the sign boards on the highway that direct to evening star lane. her voice treads carefully like qi-rin on grass and her sawdust lantern heart was carved of integrity and grit. and, in those moments when a cloud passes over her face, i know somewhere her mind is falling asleep on cold grassy cliffs and listening to the ocean.

letter to parents about the daughter they never knew — f. noelle

[lionchai]

It doesn’t matter which body I am in, how many years come and go. I return to the same things, again and again. I obsess over the unfinished, these stars that spark embers in the wires of my attention. The shape or form doesn’t matter. I will recognize it. sunbeam, sparrow, or poet, my heart still stumbles to the same temples. It is the radiant, the curious and electric, that leash my fascination- give me a puzzle, give me the unpredictable. I am a satellite gravitating to the brightest flame in the constellation, my kryptonite and cynosure.

what I have always loved — f. noelle

[lionchai]

They were ordinary until they belonged to hands that tilted my chin like I was spun from something holy. Ordinary, until they belonged to minds whose ideas enchanted me in a fleet of possibilities. They haunt me in meteor showers of memories, and the syllables fall on my mouth like firework petals, sharp and shimmering shards of sunlight. These are the names I collect as secrets. The names that echo with the ghosts of people I loved and the people that left.

my favorite names. — f. noelle

[lionchai]

I fall in love with people for the way they see the world. The glittering train wrecks, the sky-throated bravado. For holding eye contact and acknowledging my existence. But I’m still learning to run with the exit wounds and fault lines, the open chasms they tear into the star memories of my skin. Night skies bleeding into empty space.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

There is a whale who swims by herself, and her song is on a lower frequency than what other whales can hear.

In Japan, there is a phenomenon, kodokoushi, where people die of loneliness. They die by themselves, and sometimes their bodies will rot in their apartments for months before they are discovered. Mostly for unpaid bills. Sometimes for the sickly sweet stench leaking under the door.

There is no word in the English language for the opposite of loneliness. The closest is ‘connection.’ But it falls empty. It misses the mark of what I mean.

I want a word for the whale finding another who hears her song. I want a word that offers an alternative to kodokoushi; a word for the will to live because of beautiful late night conversations, the seven billion other people in this world we still have yet to meet, laughing with a friend until your stomach hurts. A word for whispered secrets, for someone leaning their head against your shoulder and you holding still so they don’t move away. A word that makes you stay.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

night call:

i. Black grids at dusk, angels caught in powerlines, a murder of crows.

ii. Sneaking out late at night, I close the back door on these cold visions. The codas that haunt my sleep. Mom and dad say don’t it’s dangerous but I’m not scared of poltergeists. I have my meteorite dagger.

iii. I can’t not look back and so I gently untangle the angels from the wires. nobody holds my hand anymore when I cross the street but at least the angels are watching. And so I hold my breath, try not to notice the way the pavement smells after it rains, try not to think about how there is a word for someone who is next or destined to die. I pretend I don’t know.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

do you ever feel like you knew someone in a past life, and you ended unresolved because neither of you could swallow your fear? i felt that, once. in some past life we once knew each other better than the heartlines on our own palms. but we exist now, and there’s a lonely ache in the chasm between us, the continental drift of a story unfinished. i wish in this life, the sparrows sitting on telephone wires could see us and say, ‘there. this time they will be unafraid.’

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

i used to love the cool taste of mint in my mouth. the arctic snap of the word frost, the color cyan.

now i want the tropic heat, the deluvial, cinnamon cimarron. searing my eyelashes, the mad screaming and glowing that is life.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

i. 

he reminds me of you in so many ways, except for your firework effervescence. he’s streetlights flickering at night, pacific coastlines stretching into empty space, some fluorescent adolescent who makes no sense. he’s inconsistent, ambitious, and halfway reckless. he still hasn’t the faintest idea who the hell he is, yet he talks like he’s got something to prove.

ii. 

he tells me to imagine a capital in the heartland, skyscrapers leaning into the sky surrounded by an ocean of gold wheat fields. “imagine it!” he says, hands shaping cities in the air, and his eyes are glowing, and i look at him incredulously because i’ve only ever thought of kansas as brown and dead and empty.

iii. 

he tries so hard to be this brooklyn shade of cool, but he’s just a kid. a lonely white star i fear is dying.

he’s such a kid sometimes, a kid trying to grow up too fast // — f. noelle

[lionchai]

touched my tongue to the match, offered my wrist to the blue light flame. came as close as i could to immortal. dared the heavens to let me burn.

and so i bit my tongue until it bled- held back the satellite hymn straining from behind my teeth. found another pile of dead locusts that july night, heaped on the back porch. the night stars glittered like cold dead things, half delirious in a fever dream; fell half nauseous to my knees.

whatever it takes, i whisper.

the answer came in satellite winged bats, storm in the nocturnal gutters of my stomach. the simmering, the blistering, the saudades wrenched from crickets in the dark.

i wanted so badly to be divorced from the limitations of body.

— f. noelle

[lionchai]

when coyotes flee the lights, i wonder if the streetlights find the shadows of their paws thrumming over the asphalt. i wonder if their coyote hearts are shouting, i’m alive! if they know winter is over or they never noticed. 

— f. noelle