“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

 

Garçon, you snore so rhapsodically but hup hup,
peach schnapps & Coke Zero
with a gumball-green mermaid swizzle stick—

A heartvein throbs between her brows: Ketty-San’s
incensed another joke’s made at her expense,
With characters of granite schist, she hashtags a ban

I want to write like a man, probing
my glitchy mind like it’s the rarest orchid.
But I’m cowed,

The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it. 
They see us ride, they say
all you men going the wrong direction. 

Ate stew, shot a man,
Bandy body spraddled, so full of lead 
Cabron can’t even walk uphill. 

Choi Seungja writes, with terrifying alacrity, the existential despair of living in a hierarchical society where free will is a joke.

Watching Richard Pryor, I had a revelation: What the fuck am I doing here? Who am I writing for?