Kazumi Chin
Becoming Ariana |
To sing, first I learned to breathe.
I saw I could ask my lungs for air, wailed like a banshee. Gave me a band name, put pure diva inside me, was rocking all the gossip columns. They were saying I needed to be carried, I was speaking like a baby. I wanted to be a diva, I did, but couldn’t get my cat ears in time for the transformation, so the witches hitched their kites to their brooms and left me. Left their spells still clogging my heart. And then it stopped completely. And collapsed. Then I was born. And the best part of this song is the resolution. I mean, revolution. I mean, better to become inarticulate, the tongue a revolver. I was two when I decided never to stop singing. Christmas tapes all year round. Knew the words, but couldn’t make them with my lips. If you ask me about it, I’ll tell you I gave up on language. I never cared about Santa, or his sleigh. Was never about words, but the resurrection of my body. The voice of my soul hits whistle tones higher than Minnie’s. But a man stole my voice, the same day he stole Mariah’s, dropped some baritone in my drink and slipped away. Still, in my head, I sound like a dolphin. I am so very screechy. |
The Obsession Is Real
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Is a comment I read on YouTube
posted by a girl who can’t stop hyperventilating when Ariana releases a new video on her channel. Breathe, I want to say, I feel you. And how absurd to say this, because I don’t, we’re all alone in our feelings, I’m on this side of the river, and she’s on the other. I am a tornado unto myself, each tree my own, though they might poke at my eyes the way trees poke at yours. But in this tornado, on this side of the river, Ariana’s voice pierces me like a tree, except that tree is made of candy, and I just want to taste it, wherever that wound finds my skin. Want needles laced with Ariana jammed all over my body, and I wonder if others are so crazy. I listened to Ariana for seven hours on repeat, from SF to LA, seven hours back. The obsession is real. Yes, I am an Arianator. Someone writes that note could cure cancer, and I know what she means. Because every note gives me cancer, every note cures me of it, I am all excess, completely devastated. This poem has none of the depth of any of the others I’ve been writing, but I don’t care. Sometimes love has no depth. Sometimes love wears short skirts and cat ears. Sometimes I want to be destroyed and resurrected, a single, pure, shining note that stretches from the lungs of a twenty-one- year-old girl, winds its way around the world, one corner of the Internet to the next. I would find the people who need me, give them my chemotherapy. I would stop the sick from dying, I would bring the dead back to life in the way that I am brought back to life in Ariana’s song. Somehow I am not alone here, somehow she is climbing from my mouth, over and over, swirling through my tornado, and I’m flickering between so many channels of loving. |
KAZUMI CHIN is a poet from El Cerrito, California. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and his BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. He has work published or forthcoming in the Ilanot Review, Miramar, Twelfth House, the Casserole Online Reading Series, and the Lo Writer poetry series.
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