Blue God (circa 1952)
ANTHONY IMM
HEAR ANTHONY READ HIS PIECE HERE!
My mother once caught the blue whale with only her raw knuckles:
She’d dove into the East Sea, off the coast of Busan, watching behind
a slab of basalt until her fingers pruned, until she could suck the
salt out of her own skin & taste the bubbles of a river spirit who
flowed out too far to stay afloat. Hours lulled into night—Silence. Dark
inked every film of ocean black, except the blue whale, who glowed
like a white man’s city. Every texture a lightbulb. Iridescence. Eyes
the sharpness of a lightning strike. She ferried civilizations on
her back, nurtured colonies on her underbelly, like a mother. She
stretched over the entire ocean, anchored the water calm. A
mammalian myth, so vast, so beautifully tragic—my mother,
mesmerized, leapt towards the light & through the water
& pierced the heart in one clean strike. All around her, the blood
brightened until the ocean swallowed her whole. Moon tides,
rising the sea into shore. Beached, we found her in one. The
village acknowledged her, the manless whore had seized
god. She’d clean us for months from the milkman’s burden:
the chocolate-filled hats, the white rice, rationed soup & broth;
now, we had her. At home, my mother scrubbed off the barnacles,
cleaved the meat off her bony rinds, sutured the blubber into
winter quilts, whittled a single rib into five-hundred arrows. While
we feasted, laughed so hard the magpies cherished us as luck, my
mother cried: every night for months until we were done
& hunting season returned. When I asked why, she said
it was called grieving: to castrate memory into only its bareness
behind, like a once-garden plowed with the rising sun into
blood. That bitter afterthought of
nostalgia, the illusion. The myth. Withering.
I Promise, He Is Insane
ANTHONY IMM
Seventeen—
I am a man now, my mother warns me. So
I inaugurate myself with a tunic, a basic red badge,
pledging loyalty to a sky embossed by Community.
My village is miles from the capital—the glitz-
pop metropolis, where the Father & His Father’s
spirit live—everywhere in every hidden
corner of a minute, or a second. Time is a
fruit, awaiting for consumption. We stay quiet /
We listen / We roll / Presence, like a boulder / We
roll / Trucks ablaze, cursing the god / damn / Americans /
I’m almost there now. Recruitment. Cold sweat. Bloodied
noses, recursion of the body / of the dead / Resist living
to live / We venerate. When I was eleven, my father
left my Father to search for the white man’s paradise down
south. The day before he left, he kicked one of his brown
goats so hard, its tongue popped out of its jaw. Lolling,
like a child. I couldn’t even ask why: he screamed, so loud,
voice cracking: the goat looked so much like Him,
like Him— it looked so much like Him.