Songdo
- Songdo
Free climbers let their bodies fall, inflict them onto land as a reckoning:spines infinite, curved as the skies. Over hot stones of samgyetang,they tell me how they saw her slip into the depths.I sense some nameless creature stumbling towards me in the dark.
Noah says he felt his soul exit his body once, through the mouth.Climbs a tree, wasted and half-conscious. Infinity is impossiblebut exists ubiquitously shining on his left ankle.I imagine there are simpler ways to say irony exists.
Tonight, they're playing techno salsa. Misshapen beats over static,stumbling through tables and time. The bruising trauma of technologyleaves us romantic, wanting—
We drown the unrequited in tequila and lime. No salt.Raise our glasses to Joshua Tree, where we'll go to dancewhen all the lights flicker out. Play a game of chanceoutside the 7-Eleven. Ride through aluminum-grown salt flats,rice wine clanging against our bike handles,distorting the city's ribcage. The future is here! into its steely core.
After twenty four years and two months of collectinga near-fully formed prefrontal cortex, I've never felt real.Just that empty hum of quantum memory. Lovely and loud.Dreaming of civil nonexistence, guardiansof the endless apartment complexes.
Outside building 706, Sam strums chords into the ether.Sneakers greet the winking dark, reaching for the other sidebeyond silver spokes. Elon Musk, keep your galaxy empty—can't you see there are people who want to stay? [End Page 116]
Rachel Han is a poet, singer-songwriter, and instrumentalist. She graduated from the University of Florida with a BA in Political Science and worked in juvenile justice policy as a research fellow. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry and jazz studies at Rutgers University-Newark where she also teaches English Composition.
