Janice Kang

breakfast of butterfly wings

let's do modern naïveté like a warm film, our legs hanging out of windows
to deliver handmade notes across ledges. my shuddering arm
caught by your hand that should not quite be there,
but i think this is love, & today you reach out,
touching the underside of my limbs in the same way you take your pictures:
softly, & full of direction, like making a map out of me,
the aimless one. rearranging me
into piano strings. your eyes sway with music, a hum-kiss-hymn,
though i only see it scarcely-- pickpocketed into the pleats
of my skirt, to which i trace the gaunt outline of your mouth that 
was sewn. i used to crochet. now,
i hook my needlework hands into the fabric of your shirt &
you click your windchime camera-shutter in my face
hum schubert's operas into the gaps made between the folds of
our notes, wherein my poems lie &
your doodles appear, spellbound//lovebound//homebound
ft. us, our hands as the ribbon embroidery i have stitched hastily
to represent our nose-brushing love, playing
schubert's alfonso &estrella from your childhood, the backstage 
ballerinas pointing their toes as a compass back home, where
static television & winter-storms & firelight all flicker:
that incomplete transmission & gooeyness by which our windows are closed tonight,
shows of dollish girls peeking out of their windows with glass eyes
curated by careful dollmaker hands &
i guess our love is a lilac dollhouse full of marble angels,
inanimate in stop-motion film with painted smiles until red robins
have overcome our faces. listening to birdsong &
pushing butterfly wings through my larynx, past the stutter
where i word vomit that transience out &
it's so light, all of this, your autumn hands placating
the sometimes-shivers of my forearms,
leaving ink stains behind as kiss-marks of our own language.
we poets are romantic & softly nihilistic in a tender,
hopeless kind of way, eyes brimming with sparkling grape juice &
tonight i cry against your chest with butterfly wings simmering against my rib cage,
the vulnerabilities that burst-- we poets have suns as hearts
though not in the luminous way, just
in the sudden explosive kind of way, countdowns to nulla &
my supernovas. tonight i cry against your chest &
wax velleities & vignettes out of the moon's underside
as you do indie scripts in my earthquaking arms & oh,
you filmmakers and your abstract minds, your art, 
your numinous eyes kissing at old films & you,
reciting them back to me in quotes that pertain to me. 
i don't know much about filmmakers or photographers,
just you, but i love the way you inscribe the dreaminess of life
right into my sad-poet trope:
the scent of creamy coffee & a careful mouth, yours,
daydreaming in classes with bright-city eyes &
hoarding antiques & assigning roles to inanimate creatures,
autumn in four humanly walls, a tender
gloom that settles in bone-flesh-lenses.


Janice Kang is an amorist, poet, & highschool student. Her writing, which focuses on the intersection between love, hope, & trauma, can be found in SURFACES.cxGlass: A Journal of PoetryExpat Press, & others. She can be found @janiceykang on Twitter where she rambles in fragments about her love for BTS & her lover — or in the soft spaces of tea ceremonies, flowers, downpours, & shrines.