Lo Kwa Mei-en: Sonnet with Media Cycle
Marry me, but say my skirt was like a rocket hithering. Let's make a buzz
newsfeed on newsfeed will go black market for. You “act” the mega-
lomaniac and I'll be plain mania with a bell on. I know this game; it's easy,
out in the open. You untie Mars and I electrify Venus and you fill the tub,
kiss-and-kill to the max. The headline will be feature-length, better than sex,
promise. If I scream, you scream. We are zeros if not for real, and the logic
justifies a one-way ticket. Marry me in subsidized white, a bride of tomorrow
qua tomorrow, no guarantee for the weight of my gravity as my pretty hand
inches to a gun that glowed through Act Two. We'll make love atop the TV,
ricochet, replay, and, of course, record. You'll be a future tense communiqué
hacking the velvet time delay and I'll reenact the colonist screaming Adieu!
Sensation on bloodstain, opera on space—how on Earth will we pull it off?
Get me, bright star. It's a gun and my heart in a gravitas field. It's a sure shot
to the bottom and in war or free fall the bottom kicks out like a cloned leg.
Freedom gamer wanted. Come over to my planet where I shoot third persons
until the moon stabs down, up, down, the sky bloodied by a thumb's hush.
Epinephrine is in the pantry. You restock the virtual barrack and I'll gather
virgins under a wing for scenery; you be commander take-no-prisoners and I,
destruction in a smoking catsuit slipping for a walking warhead with an EQ.
Welcome yourself. Marshall me in red, red, red, and sit tight as a white raj,
come to my planet to evangelize the sofa, the sand, the alien bow of my lip,
XOXO. In my house, we sign off swords and shields. Is it a luxury to pick
battles like there will be one left to win? I like to pick a story. Go viral or go
yellow away under the mediocre off-white flag of the era we're calling hell.
Absorption over action equals erotic algebra, so master me in real time, in
zillions subscribed. You engineer a precedent and I'll give it legs that roam
mons and sinuous cables of Mars and all the moons. You be a sexual whiz
nuking the netherworld of our limbic system, your skin a deus ex machina
letting us live, at last—but we won't last. Let's bathe in screenglow as today
orbits a memory revolving around itself and you rewind you. Good headjob.
Kill, marry, or fuck me, me, or me? Let's sync and come to chimeric climax
pixel by pixel, let's fall to the cutting room floor. The script of the apocalyptic
joyride leads to a new tryst in trilogy form where my body will, tomorrow,
quit you. So I market you in red, flushed savior flaying the haunch of every id
in a spitting fit of love. I want you to want me angry, naked, and ugly, perv
reversing the life expectancy of an expectation, my purity to push to pulse.
Heroes are what I want when I want it and by the bedside of my tableau
substitutes unpeel from still shots I stashed to get me, compassionately, off.
Gunmen defy gravity in the safe spaces even as your sex helps me hit Eject
The Weakest Link. I can't help feeling like something great is coming
for me. White gunmen defy surveillance everything every day for centuries
until we can't see a thing. Let's not stop this, or weep. With enough
engineering feeling becomes social intelligence and the upgrade is better,
virtual as reality hitting home. You emulate loving something. I'll put my I
down on a bed red and silken as a president's map dreaming big, tranq-
washed between fine lines. The world can wait. I called the news I won a DJ
contest and made him play our song. Let's go out with a bang, on a loop,
xenon reddening the marquee of you and me before we lose my temper, OK,
baby, it's OK, sort of. There's a national safety network for a pale concerto,
your audience shooting children down, my fans jamming the rude signal.
Are we there yet? The network put out a call for action. Let's make a clean
zenith of that and wake up stars. Ever since I was a little girl, I had a dream.
LO KWA MEI-EN is the
author of Yearling (Alice James Books, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and
have won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor of Better: Culture & Lit. More from this
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