Sean Cho A.
Dogma
My flank could be cut with a Santoku knife.
You would marvel in my stomach meat
when it’s drenched in soy. And she wishes
there wasn’t a cigarette box on our nightstand.
I’m narcissistic in the sense that I’ve replaced
birth names with satin sheets.
The solution is simple:
make the music louder, let the fan spin,
and wipe the stomach acid off the toilet seat.
My love is in the next room sleeping.
If I throw mirrors against the sidewalk,
I wouldn’t spend nights sticking forks down my throat.
Gravity doesn’t care about the conditions
I placed between my brain folds.
My neighbors practice Hinduism.
After a week of fasting they left naan on my doorstep.
In the next life, I don’t want to be beautiful.
I want to be a lionfish.
Rats live between hunger and want.
I once saw one gnaw off its own tail from inside a trap.
He just carried it away to somewhere.
She left her body prickly.
In the way that she was raised
to be God fearing and snorted Ambien.
There’s a place between God
and the woman who says she loves me:
a place for shame. I sat there placing nicotine
on my temples. When I said I loved our bedsheets,
I meant I could take my shirt off and let them cover my rib cage.
Sean Cho A. is the author of “American Home” (Autumn House 2021) winner of the Autumn House Publishing chapbook contest. His work can be future found or ignored in Pleiades, The Penn Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California Irvine and the Associate Editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal. Find him @phlat_soda
