Hannah Seo
I’d rather not go to the golf course
though my elbows are as slick as the rest
of them — cut to ninth where new rolls of soily
skin are grafted to the chiseled hills,
to where oil drips
down forearms
and pools
into white
leather gloves.
champagne gurgles
my voice (cut to before our bodies
were mute) and I stand
unpolished: green-
and-brown-stained.
cut to me in front of the dumpster bins wondering
if it is I who should be (re)used or
recycled or
and I miss the time before the wolf, before the cry,
before I ever knew of numbers or landfills. cut to
Pebble Beach California where
you cannot see the sand it’s so tiled
in dimpled white,
where shiny people launch meteorites
of rubber and zinc and
where, when the geese scream,
it’s called a chorus — a sonata presto agitato
This poem was originally published in Open Minds Quarterly in Spring, 2019.