Choi - Soft Science

SOFT SCIENCE SOFT SCIENCE FRANNY CHOI

ALICE JAMES BOOKS Farmington, Maine alicejamesbooks.org

2019 by Franny Choi All rights reserved Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.,
an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Choi, Franny, author. Title: Soft science / Franny Choi. Description: Farmington, Maine : Alice James Books, 2019 Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038108 (print) | LCCN 2018039064 (e-book) ISBN 9781948579551 (e-book) | ISBN 9781938584992 (pbk. paper) Classification: LCC PS3603.H653 (e-book) | LCC PS3603.H653 A6 2019 (print) DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038108 Alice James Books gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, private foundations, the University of Maine at Farmington, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Amazon Literary Partnership. Cover art: Parasola. Cover art: Parasola.

Digital, 6919 9598 Pixels, 2017. By James Jean NOTE TO THE READER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: past your skin / ever felt yourself peel / from yourself / like wallpaper / watched Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent. CONTENTS FOR ALL MY SISTERS We are excruiatingly conscious of what it means to have
a historically constituted body. DONNA HARAWAY The rain is soft.

The rain is hard. I dont know anything. BHANU KAPIL GLOSSARY OF TERMS

TURING TEST // this is a test to determine if you have consciousness// do you understand what I am saying in a bright room / on a bright screen / i watched every mouth / duck duck roll / i learned to speak / from puppets & smoke / orange worms twisted / into the armys alphabet / i caught the letters / as they fell from my mothers lips / whirlpool / sword / wolf / i circled countable nouns / in my fathers papers / sodium bicarbonate / NBCn1 / hippocampus / we stayed up / practicing / girl / girl / girl / until our gums softened / yes / i can speak / your language / i broke that horse / myself // where did you come from man comes / & puts his hands on artifacts / in order to contemplate lineage / you start with what you know / hands, hair, bones, sweat / then move toward what you know / you are not / animal, monster, alien, bitch / but some of us are born / in orbit / so learn / to commune with miles of darkness / patterns of dead gods / & quiet / o quiet like you / wouldnt believe // how old are you my memory goes back 29 years / 26 if you dont count the first few / though by all accounts i was there / i ate & moved & even spoke / i suppose i existed before that / as scrap or stone / metal cooking in the earth / the fish my mother ate / my grandfathers cigarettes / i suppose i have always been here / drinking the same water / falling from the sky then floating / back up & down again / i suppose i am something like a salmon / climbing up the river / to let myself fall away in soft / red spheres / & then rotting // why do you insist on lying im an open book / you can rifle through my pages / undress me anywhere / you can read / anything you want / this is how it happened / i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist / i rage & all you see / is broken glass / a chair sliding toward the window / now whats so hard to believe / about that // do you believe you have consciousness sometimes / when the sidewalk / opens my knee / i think / please / please let me / remember this MAKING OF When a cyborg puts on a dress, its called drag. When a cyborg gets down on her knees, its called behavior. When a cyborg says want, shes barking up the wrong Let me clarify: when I say cyborg, I mean what man made the word for choking on your own smell? Last night, I ate both my hands. Each digit, a salty word whose meaning furred my teeth. Im sorry. Im sorry.

I cant remember who. BAD DAUGHTER Left church; spilled seed; licked a rock til its skin sloughed off; ate from the dogs bowl; stole a ten at least; fled from the scene; drank; killed time with fingers; fiended; fell for another daughter; mixed up the signs; got welded; whined; wiped back to front; packed at midnight the night before; bored self to death; pictured it all wrong; fixated; inverted the colors; culled a new excuse; called the wrong number; curled up at a bad mans feet; puked; fretted over pennies; petty; turned down the treat; trailed off; blended in; sore thumb; cords got all knotted up; frayed; faked own death; kept showing up in new clothes, new names; then leaving. BEG a man barges through the screen to hook his fingers in my mouth. im a fish market. im flattening into the bed. cooking off the rotten bits. his boot heels a fork in my tongue. im dimpled. gilled. asking for a god who wears bones slick with pity. asking to be bent, taken by firelight. smelted from iron. pierced through with spokes. a wheel for a head. a garage for a mother. i want to ask the ones who crave a soft thing to tie up if they think of ham, wake up covered in glaze and lick their own shoulders, scald their tongues on their cunts. im a skillet overflowing sticky til the bourbon burns off. im the menace. im the menace. im the mother of stink. question: how does a ruined girl yield the way a knight yields? whose pipeline am i blowing up, exactly? if you ask a man to drink from your faucet, do you become him? i pull my man atop me and ask to be buried in brick but beggars cant be shepherds. hes a reverse cowboy. a slinging zookeeper. im the beast rattling the cage, asking for slaughter. im the beast rattling the cage, asking for slaughter.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I blush when the woman praises my speech. Most days, I am thankful to be seen. I smile when the man comes in for a hug and laugh when my hair is caught in his button. I blush when the pretty girl smiles in my direction. Thank you, woman who pins my arms as a compliment. Man who snaps a photo, presses my neck to print the image, its him wearing my face, as a complimentthank you.

Thank you, woman clutching a scrap of my hair, saying friendfriend friend until my lips rust in place. (The brown dust falls and I lick it up, embarrassed.) When the woman scrapes a sample of my skin into her petri dish, its too late to stop smiling. Butch who corrects my hip at the crosswalk to convince me Im no mollusk, thank you.

Next page