How an Animal Knows Where She Ends
and You Begin

2022
Sun Yung Shin

I heard your mother ask you, Where are the edges of your body
You replied, jump rope is a cable of howl

We read that the rope is not a lead but a whip
You saw that a crop scoops the air out of space
Space flogs the air and styles it a beggar
How the parabola arcs into geometry around the body

When the arithmetic is a kindness and not a rectangle to be buried in
When the rope is a dragon or a divining rod
Translucent tables below us and the yellow
diamond snakes beneath

A world on its cable swinging
Find in our minds the mushrooms, how they grow clandestine reveries

My dream fills your body like smoke
We have stored the lungs of the extinct in blue jars
hung them like Chinese lanterns

Rupture into spores and lash the world to the
evolution of decay

Your jump line to moor everything to the beginning
The mares of the moon and more to fall into

See the row of old pins haunting the machines
Hold our noise fast to every threshold