Body Builder

BY CATHY PARK HONG

Read the poem

I can no longer blush. Half-face towards the starchy scape.

Birds limn the spindle trees, their Listerine-hued eyes dart

as they trill mechanical dirges tabulating not again, not

again / I can no longer blush. The flat arctic sky

boundlessly jogs to another hemisphere / She grows!

Or her pectoral grows or all her pectorals grow / A drop of body

oil the size of a water balloon splooshes down on a man as a graceless

anointing, atomizing into tears / How delicate the sounds are from

her height! Glottal roses wink out of their throats: their voices

tine/ Now I am blushing / Swamp moss draped over the arcades / Oh

she’ll topple. She’s making for the welkin / swamps massage

the plywood foundations of our houses / And speaking of / she shoots
up not like a beanstalk but a city erected quick-time / and speaking
of, I blush blood / Roiling up past 200 ft, dizzy from all that phosphagen / I
be damned where she gits all that nylon, the size of wedding tents!/ She

flexes for her audience / Naugahide. Fuel injection. A sawed-off
shotgun will do you nothing just the rat-a-tat-tat / Rabelaisian
bullhonkies hunker and tinker tents around her / Roiling,
flexing / are louts without a law to bless them / a shadow

overcast / a footstep is a swamp in which gators pop up like whack-
a-mole carnival games / what are they saying? do they marvel?/ I am
hemorrhaging flames! / she aims with her thumb.