Voyeur

Six years old: you watch people weld lips, then do funny things with their limbs.
It is a brutal pornography. Rigor mortis settling so
soon into those wonder eyes: a part of you must die when you give love.
Titanic love, a war story of amnesiac affair that condemns you with lessons.
Which cancer to pluck so that there’s a reason to say This
is eternal. You wrench romance from damnation. Lay graveyards in the
souls you meet, till you find the one who’s watched all the same porno as you. 

You learn it’s not that deep. You’re at a motel, with
the stains on the walls. After having sex, you resume. One of you turns
on the television, and there is light, and the light feels good. The fluorescent
shadows of an infomercial puppeted against both your frames.
The two of you watch for a long time until you are dipped into sleep.
No sunset in TV. The blue light cast on your faces stays blue. That
ill horizon. In your dreams, there’s white noise, and static. Those violent tides.

Haro Lee lives in South Korea with her grandmother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Zone 3 Press, The Offing, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of Epiphany Magazine’s Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can find her @pilnyeosdaughter.