I’m writing you today
to see if you have any news to share
something about which everyone would care
because a change in your life might mean one in mine
A change in your life might mean one in mine

Since I can’t be there to tell you yes or no
I hope you will be a teacher of love.
Well, I can’t hate you for existing, so
I just hate myself for not being good enough

Say, do you recall when
I thought your name was Megan or Jen?
I was like a confused mother then
and still I’m paying for that mistake even now
I’m paying for that mistake even now

Since I can’t be there to tell you where to go
I hope you will be a teacher of love (like I never was)
Well, I can’t hate you for existing, so
I just hate myself for not being good enough
Sincerely…

How will I ever get out of this hole in the earth?
there’s something poking me like a tack
I just have to get New York off my back

I pour out my heart like a gushing waterfall
and I wait here patiently for someone to call
in the dark of the night, I can see cities aglow
but even I am afraid of my own toxic flow
my face is in flames, but it doesn’t matter at all
Maybe Canada will accept this side of my rainbow

How will I ever escape this underwater grave?
there’s something turning my insides black
I just have to get New York off my back
     (it feels like a whole herd of buffalo)

I’m drowning inside myself
Oh, I’m drowning inside myself

How will I ever transcend this eerie landlocked cage?
there’s something making my resolve crack
I just have to get New York off my back

it’s your turn

I may not be perfect and follow the template in the guide
but boy, I’m like a 19 on a D20
you can keep rolling for a while,
but chances are you won’t get one better than me

Who is she that you deserted the party and max’d your charisma?
A darling halfling girl? I know moar or less
but she’s of the thief class and lies behind your back
looks like you forgot to roll a trap check

You may have rigged your mood meter,
but I see you will be hurting soon
The only cleric in this party who can heal your heart is me

I may not be the kind that you would ever expect to see
but boy, I’m like a 19 on a D20
you can roll for a human’s eternity,
but chances are you won’t get one better than me

it’s your turn

The People’s Republic of North Korea or the DPRK, commonly called North Korea in the vernacular, is a socio-communist East Asian nation. Population 23.8 million citizens. Area 120,540 km². Located on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea has a temperate climate and is prone to occasional flooding. Its longest river is the Amnok River at 790 km. The capital, Pyongyang, is also the largest city. It borders the People’s Republic of China to the north and is separated with South Korea by the demilitarized zone, or DMZ. The present Chairman is Kim Jong-nam, former president, who succeeded his father Kim Jong-il as the de facto leader of the nation despite the fact he is an illegitimate child.

When the draft was announced, not all that many people tried to evade it. They, like the youth of every age, thought themselves invulnerable—surely, they wouldn’t be receiving a conscription card in the mail. That kind of thing happens to other people. Besides, not many of our contemporaries had registered to vote since they came of age when the air was still thick with rumour of a draft for the Iraq Occupation. No one really cared too much because everyone felt detached from the DPRK War—after all, it was the Korean War, Part II—except those insiders in D.C. and those young green citizens on the army bases—two very different kinds of people connected by one atom. This is the kind of logic that society applies to all matters in this country.

In light of the flash of the mushroom cloud of North Korea’s nuclear tests, I even said openly that I had been wrong to vote for Obama, to go to his inauguration, and even to reelect the man. I didn’t mind my friend’s “told you so” attitude after my admission of fault because I was indeed in the wrong whilst he was right to withhold his vote in that historic election. Despite Obama’s words and promises, on which countless middle-class faces hinged their hope for a reset of America, US forces were deploying to the Korean peninsula once again—many said that this 44th presidency would go down in history textbooks as a short paragraph titled “The Deception of a Nation,” and though they were bitter about this hypothesis, they still shrugged it off, went to work in their red Priuses or grey SUVs, and watched American Idol every Wednesday night.

I had not had the courage to tell him so many things that sat and rotted in the pink trench around my tongue, but I was able to say this to him. “Don’t go, Cos,” I pleaded with him, tentatively wrapping my arms around his firm shoulders from behind. “Don’t go. There are ways to get out of it, you know. In high school, one of my favourite teachers told us stories about draft dodgers, so I know some techniques. Even if it’s just a facade for a day. You don’t have to go.” My entreaties met his stony silence, a defense he had hardened for the sake of duty, but they did not stop trying to chip away at that grey rock with their dulled influence. “Don’t do this.” He remained still, as though his whole body had assumed this statue-like mien. “You’re dehumanizing yourself. You might have to actually kill people. Cos. Cos. They speak English and French in Canada, you know.”

Without changing his taciturn expression, he lifted his hand and stroked the arm of mine across his chest with his fingertips, just as a farmer might habitually put his hand to his straw hat when a breeze cuts the calm. So, I knew it. We were not just stones to be tossed back into the dank quarry or names in ink on papers in files. After all, humans cannot be minimized so cleanly without fiery and potentially bloody repercussions. Of course, I can only speak for the two of us.

When I was in middle school, the only sports I was good at were dodgeball and frisbee, so naturally, I played tennis in high school. I wasn’t really all that good at tennis, but I wasn’t bad either, yet it was different from being merely mediocre or average. Those two terms fit on the lower-middle of a continuum, but I did not belong anywhere. I was too good for the less experienced players and thusly less skilled players, but on the same tarnished token, I was not good enough to play with the big boys. It turns out that I might have done pretty well with the small boys, but needless to say, that wasn’t allowed. When I got to college, I could have resumed both my frisbee and dodgeball playing, but there was something flat and invisible stopping me. I watched resilient green dodgeballs and perfectly circular white discs whistle above my head against the blue sky and momentarily eclipse the sun, but I couldn’t reach up and catch them. If I did, my hand would plunge through a glass ceiling, and my fist would become a Niagara Falls of glistening scarlet blood.
—–
I did not believe that Cossette supported the War with North Korea, but from the way he acted after being drafted, I couldn’t determine for certain. To me, it seemed unusual for him to partly enable something against which he was fundamentally disposed, but his sense of obligation must have bound him against his freer will. In fact, most of the country—save for the unbudging, reactionary octogenarians—seemed ambivalent at best to the war; fabricating the threat, the government had tried to instill fear in the hearts and minds of Americans but largely failed. Especially after the whole ordeal with Iraq fresh off our backs and leaving behind a lingering ache, if only in our ears from hearing so much about it, the American populace was imbued with skepticism about preemptively striking at another totalitarian nation that ostensibly posed a threat to us. For that reason, Americans were simply not invested in this new war, which still had the factory-fresh plastic smell in newspaper headlines and news anchor gimmicks. Wars, like World War II, unify nations with everyone sacrificing for the cause, no complaints to be heard. I, for one, was not strong like my grandmother who was about my age during the height of World War II—one definition of strong being unselfish—because she endured separation and a sacrifice to which the whole nation contributed with a brigade of smiles. But solidarity slumbered with this war effort, and so we weren’t any more strengthened, probably because the ailing economy didn’t take the upturn that was also thought to accompany wartime. People wanted to redeem Obama’s coins of hope for something, but the reimbursements were already spent in Pyongyang.

It’s funny; when we were in college, we always made fun of Kim Jong-il’s Asian accent, saying things like “o rry” in place of “oh, really?” For some reason, it wasn’t as amusing to make fun of Kim Jong-nam; perhaps it was because he didn’t have such a diminutive stature and a whistly voice, but nonetheless, he still spoke with that quintessential, consonant-swapping Asian accent. We’d shout things across the green to each other like, “Hey! I stayed up till 4 finishing my paper!” “O rry?” “Yah rry!” which was followed by the exchange of an airy but shrill chuckle. There are personalities and there are masks, but all we were trying to mar the mask a bit, just make little scratches and holes in it; if it broke and fell off, it wouldn’t be funny anymore.

Most people had the wrong idea about me and Cos, including me, mostly likely. For one thing, no matter what kind of jokes we made, even if they seemed bad and we laughed darkly from the depths of our gut, we weren’t at all racist. Also, we left each other alone, which was probably the most difficult thing for me to understand even in my obstinacy. I wasn’t like the other girls except in the fact that I was selfish; I could understand the way they think, but they didn’t know how I think, and that fact itself erected an immutable wall between me and them, and only a few could peek through the peepholes in the brick and call out random words to me.

One of my friends in college always supported me, and even though I felt like giving in now and again, she would find the reasons for me to press on; likewise, I would scrounge up purpose from the dirt of tough circumstances in which her face sometimes laid planted, and she wouldn’t surrender to improbability, either. When I sent her a message one day and told her that Cos had been drafted, she told me that I couldn’t let him go; she raged about the US government that was—according to her—dangling me above a pit of quicksand purchased with taxpayer’s dollars, the same government for which her unrequited love now worked. It sounded as though she were tearing apart her words with the fangs of a dog and throwing them down with the bloody clamp of her jaw. She wanted to fight for me, even though it was a battle only I could win, and in that way, we fought for the peace of someone who was leaving to fight for peace.
—–
We were waiting outside at Fort Bragg, which had expanded to encompass special military operations, the air force, and conventional ground forces. I didn’t always follow how some things changed, like the way Kim Jong-nam’s newest nuclear test suddenly merited a mobilization of troops into the DPRK when all sorts of previous tests, most of them under the current chairman’s father, had happened without anything more than a diplomatic—that is, toothless—excoriation. I knew this fact to be true because we had learned about all those nuclear tests in college, in a classroom in which the radiator clanked all the way into springtime. Although each subsequent test was more and more successful, they all landed on the side of failure, in which case the Sea of Japan was failure. Either way, a disproportional response to an asymmetrical threat elicited a heightened reaction in my dear friend from college, as well as in the subconscious network of my brain, but nowhere beyond that.

Even though I was all the way at this point, whose penetrating luster seemed to be only an illusion that ensconced the darkness of reality, I did not feel a sense of finality; rather, I felt as though I were going up, ascending a staircase of clouds with the hem of a turquoise satin dress elegantly trailing behind me, but I was trembling all the while, scared that I was going to fall. I loved to drag the back of my wrist along wooden banisters as I went up steps. I first learned of the joy of this in college, when I would deliberately walk up the uninterrupted staircase that spanned two stories, with the railing of stained cherry so long and pristine and continuous. It was as though with the roughness of my skin and the inexorable smoothness along which it ran, I was coasting down the concave inside of a glass bowl. When I wondered about the vitrification of an entire city, a few days before my departure to Fort Bragg, I was eating from a bowl of pudding-tears, vanilla and lemon yellow on a cheap plastic spoon.

I had always been afraid to meet his family. Even though I had always wanted so desperately to know them, just from the way he talked about them, I had been scared that I would offend them, or maybe just say the wrong thing, or perhaps even betray the secret nuances of the bizarre friendship between me and Cos. Yet, here they were now, on the field of this army base, waiting with me to say goodbye to him. Now, it was like the times with him when I couldn’t manage to say what I wanted, so I pretended like I didn’t know what to say, like a foreigner who can’t express herself because her spindly hand could not yet grasp the strange language. I stared at these familiar strangers but looked away when any one of them glanced at me. I felt afraid and humble to be beheld by their eyes.

When I saw his little sister, two years his younger, I was shocked by her height; I could never imagine her being so short, even though I knew she was. Her hair that veiled her head like a sweetly-woven nest of golden-bronze threads glistened like vocal cords of a mute angel. I had always wanted to whisk away her worry from her sweet but imperfect face; at that moment, I wanted to say, “Hey, I know you’re worried, but everything will be alright. I got your brother’s back,” and even though I had his back—theoretically, and therefore arbitrarily—I was never considered a bro. And now, since I couldn’t be in the same brigade as his, because society segregated us on the basis of our bodies, I couldn’t say I had his back anymore, and I would have to let his poor little sister down, since I couldn’t trust any of the other soldiers to protect him. With all this in mind, I just looked down at my pigeon-toed feet and turned my sun-scorched cheeks into a soft smile that I tried to aim at her.

I also looked to his mother, whose pale face had been creased with the pressures of stress and always being answered with vagaries. I wanted to glean an iota of her daughter’s angelicalness so that, with the power of God, I could bless her dear soul. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t crying, but I figured that she would be by the time Cos would have turned his back on us. I wanted to say to her this benediction I wished upon her, but I couldn’t open my mouth; it must have been something that ran in their family that paralyzed my tongue.

Then, Seth Cossette appeared with an aura of glory dampened by the olive drab of his fatigues, his face carrying a smile for his family. He embraced them softly, as though he were consoling estranged acquaintances reunited by the misfortune of a funeral; I stood in the background, fingering the hem of my oversized t-shirt, wondering what I should say. It felt as though I were watching a scene from an old silent film, but I felt the hot and stifling air imbued with awkwardness instead of the excessive air conditioning of a movie theater. When he let his father out of his arms, he turned to look at me and caught me staring at him. I admit that I didn’t much like his army hair cut, but even as he walked toward me, I didn’t look away.

When it came to grave and controversial matters, I was never really able to say what I had wanted to him; rather, I always managed compromises that rose from the wreckage of strange stumblings. At that moment, I put my forehead on his shoulder and murmured into his uniform, “You never did listen to me, you know.”

“Hmm, what’s that?” he asked, gently pushing my shoulders and looking to my face for an answer.

“It’s nothing,” I replied, embracing him closely.

“Miss you, okay?” he said, and I felt much younger than he was.

“Yeah, you too,” I whispered. I loosened my embrace and looked slightly up at him. I wanted to touch his lips—outlined in crisp almond sunlight—with my own, but I merely waited, vaguely like a frightened mouse in the corner. Instead, he covered my eyes with the palm of his firm hand and gave me a pat on the head. I couldn’t even see lines of light from between his fingers, no light at all; no one ever thinks I’m worthy of the truth. It was like when my father died of a cancer for which they said he had already had preventative surgery; they wouldn’t tell me the real situation, as though they didn’t think I deserved to know. It was also reminiscent of the college days in which nobody told me the truth, and I felt as though my hands were tied behind my back as my friends tossed a black cloak over my head. I would stand there as they shuffled about the room, talking, but also not talking; I felt like this even though I was watching with my eyes and saw everything they did.

“I’ll email you,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know it. Have lots of fun without me!” His voice came to my ears like radio waves tinged with static, and I wanted to tune it more clearly without tuning him out, but he had nothing left to say. With that, he took his hand from my eyes; though the scene was blurry, I watched him share one last gesture of affection with his family and run across the concrete wasteland to board the plane.

I couldn’t see very well because my eyes were slow to adjust to the sun that was great in the sky like a god, so I made my way back to the parking lot entrance by recognition of large amorphous landmarks. The next thing I could see clearly was a crosswalk and its glaring orange hand, counting down to the light change. As each second ticked down, he took another breath, his final ones. I breathed in separated synchronization with him, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as I watched the last seconds of his life tick by, meted out for me by the flagrant orange digits. And even if no one would tell me the truth, I knew that the plane with a faulty, fractured fuselage would explode on the runway, but I would never hear about it on the news because the government would cover it up. I could feel the change in air pressure as his rare smile was blown to smithereens, but I would never hear a word of it. The palm of the hand flashed at me to stop, numberless.

No one really seemed to want the DPRK War, which is why I wanted to hold him back even at the last hour. They did nothing to stop it because the government they had elected made the decision, ostensibly, in the best interest of the country and the constituency. After all, our democracy is shaped, as it should be, by a backwards society’s unwritten regulations. I hated this society that branded a ♀ on my forehead, though I can’t see it myself; that’s why they grimaced whenever they saw my unshaven legs and scared me into wearing jeans, even in the heat of the summertime. I couldn’t even express the essence of our friendship in a way they would ever understand. With this war, America was losing a great mind, consigning him to mindless physical “service,” a lawyer by chance but someone who could be anything, maybe even the next Peter Parker.

I had thought him dead for all this time, all these years, until yesterday, when I saw him in the supermarket with his wife and children, but without the patch of leukoderma and a little taller. I could have never been that wife with rosy cheeks and black waves anyhow. I stared at him, but I couldn’t run to him without knowing what to say. I consider now, as I sit her in my splintery rocking chair, that it was probably his younger brother, whose hair must have darkened over time, just like my father’s did. After all, the plane exploded on the runway and his family grieved and I wasn’t notified because I’m just the girl who voted for Obama in college, and I’m still here.

I may have had a purpose that I have come to fail,
so I must seize the day and shake out happiness.
I have resolved not to give up anymore,
even if it means that I must hurt you.

You will find I’m weak and confused,
and I don’t deserve anything for which you strive.
Yet, I win because that person’s not there anymore,
but you have the summer on your side.

You know the doubt of my heart now,
and that when I am threatened I will fall,
so you can step over my body without fighting anymore,
and claim your prize in this strange place.

One day, all of our dreams will be betrayed,
and the illusion you’ve won will fall away.
When that day comes and I can’t recall that face anymore,
I want to meet you and hold you.

A clash of egos rages all around me;
I don’t thrust myself with arms outstretched between them,
but I’m the only one who bleeds

They’re battling inside my brain,
and their silver swords are slashing my skull—
a hemorrhage of blood like a shot to the head,
but yet I’m the one to fall

It seems like it would have hurt me,
but I look up to the bright blue sky,
and there’s no pain inside my mind.

I don’t know why I tried,
but I know that I am right.

as you struggle in the confines of that shadow
they always think you to be so, so callow
with their wayward minds so deeply shallow

O, Little Brother, with your plain and dark black hair
you walked as one more faceless automaton in the crowd
you could shine out and rise up if they were to care
oh, how they adored your big brother on his cloud
you were crying, and you were sighing; they found it all the same
if they could see, then maybe you’d be somebody with a name

when gone was all of the world’s grace
and their cold backs were to your face
then their shadows took their place

Little Brother, face down on the shower floor, dead
if I had only known, I would have loved you instead
you shouldn’t have listened to the words they never said

O, Little Brother, with your plain and dark black hair
you could shine out and rise up if they were to care
you were crying, and you were sighing; they found it all the same
if they could see, then maybe you’d be somebody with a name

crumbled,
crumbled,
your minds are failing you now
why did you not look for the answer in the ashes?
could be a monstrosity too real for your eyes
I wonder with a burning silence,
is this a cloudy world, or is it simply that
this is a vivid world you see through frosted glass?

your words cannot heal me now
because I am numb and have been betrayed
by your abandonment of that tiny key left behind
that is now buried with the blood of G-d’s children
your purpose to cure
has given me eternal illness, for I can no longer smile
knowing that the earth embraces secrets of the past
because your logic cannot see beyond the dust of your crumbled minds

so, after all, they died in vain
in vain because it would have dirtied your hands
it is so upsetting that it crumbles my mind
and we cannot think anymore