Poem of the Week: Arhm Choi

                   

     

   

How Manifestos Are Made    

If I fail my mouth this story plays again.

Back home he yanks mama's mouth

round into screams, burns

her vocal cords to sing the real blues

of men who can't stand to be exposed

so stare the world down in rage

and red, not the toothbrush too hard red

but the red of knuckles busted by teeth,

teeth ground down into grit,

eardrums that vomit

sticky one note dirges red.

She leaves

her nightingales stranded in the winter

of his cold cocktail gins,

croaks out a song

when he bends her neck,

bruises a darker green

as the skin rushes together

in his fist,

a bouquet crumbling

in the relentless boil

of a man never satisfied

by just one song.

If I fail my mouth this story plays again

can't close, closet, or cease.

I must be the skip in the disk.

Be the fracture that makes the needle jump out

and land on anything but this.

   

-Arhm Choi

 

Used by permission.    

Arhm Choi is a poet from Ann Arbor, MI, with a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has competed nationally at the Youth Poetry Slam and has been published in The Canadian Theater Review, Peal, Otoliths, and Scholars & Rogues. She has taught writing workshops at the Neutral Zone, Jackson Community College, Youth Alive! in Detroit, and the YWCA.     

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