Garage
BY KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG
One morning my mother laid her body across the driveway
to keep my father from backing out of the garage.
Her plan was to see if his desire to leave their life
could overcome any desire he had left
not to harm her. Of course, it couldn’t.
I don’t know if she believed this was love.
I remember thinking, as I watched from the doorway,
how her white shirt, grayed and yellowed
by sweat and age, looked suddenly pure
against the gravel, in the blank morning,
and how if it had all happened at night
it would have been easier, somehow, to bear.
In the garage: a punch bag designed to resemble
a man’s upper body, stuck on a pole.
A red crate full of empty glass bottles
still smelling of sweet, rancid wine.
If shame is a place you step into sometimes
to empty forgetfulness into yourself in secret
or try to empty yourself of violence
like trying to empty a piano of its music
I understood both my mother
wanting to stay and my father
wanting to open its huge, steel doors,
to leave for good.
I understood whoever you choose to be
in love, the mother or the father,
it doesn’t matter.
You will find yourself
in your front yard
under the bright, wrong light.
Real Guitar
BY KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG
To play an instrument that’s not there
has become so popular
they invented the Air Guitar World Championships,
which makes me feel better
about all these poems about my mother
in which I rehearse any number of possible worlds
where we are not who we are,
we have not done what we have done
to each other,
while the music I pretend to be making
plays from invisible speakers overhead.
The final judging category
is most crucial, though hardest to define:
airness, which makes air guitar art
and not a fetishization of absence.
In poetry, this distinction is called faith.
As in I want what we have.
All those mornings late to school
I’d stand before you
to let you spit on my face
to rub it clean
before shoving me out the door.
As in even as I cradle nothing
in my hands, playing no music,
it is the nothing, the silence, that I want.
What you are trying to do now
with random piles of gifts, luxury bags
on clearance, shoes I will never wear,
I understand, but it has never made sense to me
why the winner of the Air Guitar World Championships
is awarded a real guitar
they’ve never learned to play.
I want you to be cruel
so I know how to love you.
When I hold your kindness
I don’t know what to do with my hands.
