Sam Cha

 
 

AUDIENCE / DISTANT / RELATIVE / ANTHROPOSITION / ENTHROPOLOGY / ANTITHESIS / I
AM TRYING TO REMEMBER / TRAITS OF HISTORY / TRACE / HOW DID I GET HERE /
WHERE IS MY MOMENT / WHERE IS THE MOTHER NOW / WHERE IS THE WORD / WHERE
DOES THE WORD COME FROM / WHERE IS IT / WHEN DOES THE WORD COME / FROM
ANOTHER MOMENT / FROM FAR / A FAR FROM HERE / NO INTERPOLATION / NO
CRYPTOGRAPHY / NO COMMENTARY / NO ETYMOLOGY / WHERE DOES MY LOVE COME
FROM / WHERE IS MY LOVE / WHEN / CALIFORNIA / APRIL / NO SUCH THING / ALL THE
TIME I HAD / HAVE / HAD / HAD HAD / AS AN INQUISITION CONCERNING NARRATIVE /
AS A DRUMBEAT /A STRING OF UNVOICED / SYLLABLES / THE DAYS WHEN I HAD / NO
PART IN THE PLOT / THE DAYS WHEN I WAS MERELY / A PART OF THE MOMENT / APART /
A VOID / AN IMAGINARY / AVOIDING / IF YOU WERE TO SPREAD THEM / THOSE DAYS /
ACROSS A MAP / ACROSS A TERRAIN / AS IF A EULOGY / COMPOSED OF UNANSWERED /
EMAILS / TEXTS / THE REPETITION OF FORGET / AS IN ALL THE MYTHS / IN THE
BEGINNING /THERE WAS A GOD / AND THEN THERE WAS A GOD / AND THEN THERE WAS
A GOD / AND THEN THERE WAS A GOD / AND THEN THERE WAS A GOD / IDENTICAL /
INHUMAN / LACKING / THE SINGING OF THE MOTHER TONGUE / THE TREMBLE / THE
SUBTLE ALTERATION / FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION / IN SKIN / IN HAIR / IN
BREATH / IN HEARTBEAT / IN BONE / THEN IT MUST BE TRUE / THAT CONFESSION / IS
BOTH PUNISHMENT / AND CRIME

 
 

AUDIENCE / DISTANT / RELATIVE,







I would like to emulate

the consciousness of objects

where what you see is

what you are as when

Sundays sometimes

you dissolve into the bare

branch of a tree fissuring

the C OL DW EL L of RE AL T Y:

I am not that I am

these fragments are traces of no ruin

these ghosts have never lived

/

The more I read Korean, the angrier I became.

I remember feeling all blue and grey and white, all frostbit, snowchewed,

all chronic overstimulation and all numb, all over

which is a strange kind of kinesiology—I'm hyper-incomprehensive, I am, etc.

By and by I got to the point where I couldn't read anymore. I had to stop.

I stopped. I stopped picturing myself as a human, as a person,

which is how I become ghosts

/


I didn't say a / ghost don't say / a ghost I said ghosts / ghosts don't say / ghost / don't say don't / say

ghost don't say / ghost don't say ghost / don't say ghost don't say ghost / don't say ghost don't say ghost

don't say ghost don't say ghost don't say ghost say ghosts

/


All those images that once
felt part of me now
scatter, eddy, drift

a twitch of wind was my talent
a fleeting sleet was my opus
a composition of a composition
of friction and chance


/


not reality but an echo

not content with itself


here in some sense the void

and image are one and the same

the void and image are one


/


"Thank you," she said, and walked back over to me. "I was confused," I said. "I was confused because I
didn't think of you as human," I said, after a couple of moments. “Is that true?” "I don't think so." "I
don't think so," said the woman. "I don't think so."

“I was trying not to think about what it would be like to be a person in the future, when the words
'future' and 'future' would be used in exactly the same way,” she said.

“Which is why I like sneaking around the edges of words in my writing: to be able to understand the
human mind better, so I don't have to look to the hideous maitreya for the last word,” she said.


/


Beyond whether you or I

can escape the sentence

or if you're not sure what to do

with your life: what with the injuries

you've suffered

or the thought that you and your family

might die

in the translation room

of another tongue: what is possible

in the event that it is not possible

to have a voice in your head

that insists on speaking English

as the first translator

in the event that it is not possible

to have a voice in your head

that insists on speaking English

as the translator of sentences that are not English

in the event that it is not possible

to have a voice in your head

that insists on speaking English

/


The world was ajar

the world was a jar

the word is not the word

I meant to say the word

I meant to say the word

is not the word I meant

/


I dreamt

I was conscious

and I was surprised


/


I meant:

I was called

to be in the

department

of history

the department

of the true

color of the sky.

 


AUDIENCE / DISTANT / RELATIVE / I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT YOU HEAR ME:





When I hear about anything, nothing comes away unplucked. From anywhere it is vacuum, even from
the little I hear from the wire in my father's room. The little ceramic frog that he uses to clean his
inkpots. The little bowl that he uses to water the fronds. The bowl that he uses to place flowers in his
garden. The bowl that he uses to tie his wrists in knots in his living room. All for nothing.

I am nothing if I am not worthy of being a person, my father said to himself. I am a myth, a poison, a
poison effaced by empathy. He closed the door behind himself, looking into the mirror. Face buried
convex. Let the floodgates close behind. Behind the window no longer open. Behind the closed doors.
Behind the herbaceous substratum. Let the undergrowth drain away from the house. Let the living
room no longer exist.

In the dead room, next to the sink, hairband and gloves still on, stains continue to trouble the carpet.
Ash color that fades to pale yellow that disappears into the distance. Ring finger stain on the wall. Ring
finger stain on the floor. Ash color that fades to lighter yellow that disappears as the carpet hits the
floor. Ring finger stain on the carpet.

I didn't know that there was so much stain left in my wake. I brush dust off my finger and I polish my
foot with my foot. I rub salt on my finger and rub salt on my foot and I rub salt on my foot and I move
into the morning. I didn't know that there was so much blood. I didn't know that there was a litany of
words like red, white, and rose. I rub salt on my finger and I rub salt on my foot and I move into the
next chapter, the one I didn't think I was allowed to read.

 
 

AUDIENCE / DISTANT / RELATIVE







a whisper, a handful of white chalk:

An explanation of

our breath.

An explanation of everything.

An explanation of the indifferent, imaginary, absolute.

An explanation of time.

An explanation of space.

An explanation of death.

An explanation of the angels.

An explanation of the resurrection.

An explanation of the unspeakable.

An explanation of words.

An explanation of history.

An explanation of silence.

An explanation of the knife.

An explanation of vengeance.

An explanation of nature.

An explanation of words.

An explanation of the blind.

An explanation of the inanimate.

An explanation of the inanimate, by treating of them with indifference.

An explanation of the inanimate, by treating of them with awe.

An explanation of the inanimate, by treating of them with contempt.

An explanation of the inanimate, by permitting them to be forgotten without meaning.

An explanation of the inanimate, by permitting them to be forgotten without justification.

An explanation of the irrational, by permitting them to be forgotten.

An explanation of the irrational, by giving them names.

An explanation of the irrational, by giving them places.

An explanation of the immobile, by placing them in their places of rest.

An explanation of the immobilized, by placing them in their places of deprivation.

An explanation of the oblivion that follows.

 
 

AUDIENCE / DISTANT / RELATIVE / I ADDRESS YOU / AS I WOULD A DISTANT RELATIVE / AS IF
A DISTANT RELATIVE / SEEN ONLY HEARD ONLY THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE'S DESCRIPTION






I was a stranger / I was a stranger / to myself / I was depressed / like a lot of people / History is a
wonderful sport / I walked in the rooms of myself / rifled though a desk, small, cluttered with / a Diet
Coke / a plastic spider / 5 Essays on the Lyric / Scotch tape / a silver disk struck with the face / of
George Washington / mouth closed /to hide his stolen teeth / a Pentium 4 / an empty bag of / TAKIS
FUEGO / a broken belt / a crumpled up index card scrawled with / this works this works this / writing
as a child / writing away from self / writing a way into the world / a battery / a folding knife / a heat
sink / a stimulus check / Orality and Literacy / dead JUUL pods / A Journal of the Plague Year / a
sheaf of graph paper: / “Tiresias retains memory in the underworld” / even without the gift of blood /
milk / honey / water / “the witch bends over his body, kisses him / and as she does so mutilates / his
face, bites / the tip of his tongue, pours / whispered sounds between his dry lips / to send a message
down to Styx” / (Lucan) / from whence I came / to suspect / I was in fact “Eurynomus, / who eats the
flesh of the dead, leaving only bones / blackblue as a carrion fly / resting on a vulture / pelt”
(Pausanias): / If Hamlet is almost Hamnet, / (a stranger once told me) / it's possible to confuse the
playwright / with the ghost.

 

Sam Cha is a poet, teacher, editor, and translator. His work has appeared in,
or is forthcoming from, several places, including apt, Anderbo, Better, Best
New Poets 2016, decomP, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Missouri Review, Rattle,
and RHINO. He is a poetry editor at Radius. He lives and writes in Cambridge.