Brain Activity / Moving Photograph of Girlhood
Late in the day the dream rises back up and invades—
My brother’s radiant rage, knuckles wrapped in gauze
an aurora bleeding through. The teenage body’s hellscape: crown
of my head through the windshield again. Sped-up
each time, dreaded and inevitable, as if the crash site
yearns for the crash. Then stalling at the very moment
of touch – those wingèd incantations of shattering glass
metal warping like an orca’s groan. I crawled across the highway
toward a gorgeous mirage of you, first love, leaned back in bright light.
Tattoos he gave himself with the demented electric toothbrush, all there.
But it wasn’t death I saw, because I moved toward it—
woke in a stranger’s bedroom, in a stranger’s clothes
that, waking a second time, I know are mine. Glass marble
inside a seashell left open, trapping the gaze of an eye.
Mine was a blessed sixteenth. Ritual sow cloaked in lilies, led singing
to the knife. Love was a ray of light sent down a turning hallway
by ricochet off precisely-tilted mirrors. The adults stood way out, shin-deep—god silhouettes
on a sandbar I couldn’t swim to, in the rose-gold hour, in the loneliness before words worked
at all. A storm churning inside me for orderless years. You know what I mean, I can tell.
The kaleidoscope’s continuous bloom, someone whispers a name
in your ear you won’t learn for years.Here comes the part
of each month when the moon is dark as a throat. Genatalian unravel
of wisteria’s odorous kush. North January’s harsh doubled light
like a cruel smile and that late-day, deja-vuic allure to cut loose
from the helpless animal body. Same old, grade school
ideation. But then, a dizzying rush—fey fugitive climbs the night
lattice into bedroom window like a morning glory, like vapor. Hushed—
I want to start at the beginning and tell you everything…
Two girls beneath covers, coronation of diamond-ink pupils by feathering flame
mesmer and ardor, fascinated familiar, to stare so closely that, unifying,
collapse. Eclipsing caress, heavy are the heavenly bodies, possessed
by angels. Our small grottos of sugarwater. Ornate rainforest deathtrap flowers.
Spread my legs and watch ravenous butterflies
clutter the window. My hips in her hands
like all things—dissolving and arriving at once.
…..
This poem is from the chapbook Nepenthe Radiant by Aimee Seu (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/nepenthe-radiant-by-aimee-seu/
Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia Poetry MFA and was recipient of Academy of American Poetry Prizes at UVA and Temple University. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Poets, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Leavings, Minnesota Review, among others. She’s currently studying in Florida State University’s Creative Writing PhD program.
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