Sisyphean War for Triumph


1.

It is so unladylike, these turmoils 
going through my face right now, 
so stoic-faced I was 
that my skin screams in agony 
at the sudden mountains forming 
from my furrowing brows
on their canvas plump with collagen,
the plentiful regeneration of my youthful frame, 
glossing over the valleys I carve into my face 
in protest of an unfair fate where I am 
my savior and my enemy. 

2.

Impending doom leers like a big-bellied wretch
into the bedroom window of Venus, 
her divinity stuffed into the swells 
of her breasts and womb. Sniffing 
in her innocence, a cacophony 
of lust and envy, desiring and loathing. 

3.

You find yourself seeing interstices form 
between the web connecting the fragments 
of your reality, but you remain paralyzed 
by the clashing desires and the cackling heavens 
above. The roaring of a brewing storm 
haunts the corners of your senses. 
Each nerve struck by lightning 
bolts of desperation to go back into one singular “I”.  

4.

Collect the seraphic and discordous shards 
of your conscious and compress the sliver 
of my mind into one silver ball. 

5.

But as the screams of a fallen goddess ring out 
to the night, and the tempest rages above in ire and despair, 
you know who has lost. 

But did it even matter? 

6. 

As you look through the window that the creep
creeped into, stalking Love like he was worthy of her destruction, 
the blazing levins only reveal the sins you’ve committed 
against yourself vaporized into shadows, plastered on the walls 
of the room where the agonizing reminder that it was never 
a “you” but I all along.

Grace Kim

Editor: Eliza Francis