Drunk Soliloquy

by Jessica Kim

Someone will parcel memories into the cardboard box and leave them on my doorstep. I will not be not home. Today, I no longer live in this body, fingers unhooking from the discolored sky, feet angling towards the heavens, aimless. It’s July but there is a chilliness in the air, the heavy breath of a distilled bottle of wine compressing the skyscraped morning. I ask if this is how time is supposed to pass, the speechless sorrows of the hours toppling into sorrier days. There are no mirrors in my apartment flat, no refraction for the jagged edges of time, so I learn how to tick the hands of the cuckoo clock in the living room, alone. How the seconds will replace my fingers, how the timekeeper will have twelve eyes but no face. How I am stripped away from the relentless banter of the streetlights at daybreak, saying nothing of subtraction. Again, the parking lot yawns into the map of a heartache and I leave for some forlorn highway, the sun unblinking, only leading to a cul-de-sac. Remind me I am going nowhere, not to Hollywood, nor the pub nestled on Grand Avenue. But I will still cling wine glasses alone and cheer for being trapped inside this one. This poem, right here.

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Cover photo by Julia Dragan