People Person by Joanna Cho

Author:Joanna Cho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

셋

They

are working on the brick apartment on the other side

of the office, floating above the street—

orange fish in an aquarium. We

lock eyes, the pierce of a hook. The water

wavers, my heart gasps—a pulled, lipless mouth—and I look away

and continue with administrative tasks, but the scaffolders are vivid

as a radiant heater. On sunny days

the window looks wobbly, like clear jelly I could swim through

and they

are there late into every afternoon. Their laughter filters through

silt, neon bodies glinting from the passing of steel tubes

and galvanised clips, from one side

of the clock to the other, building something. They sparkle

like a thousand dislodged scales and I wonder if we

could coordinate our movements, synchronise enough.

My daydreams bait me and catch me

and I dream of belonging in that school, in that part of the water

and they

are wearing bone hats and heavy boots but are weightless.

My colleagues and I sigh at the noise. Our annoyance ripples through

the glass but they don’t notice or don’t care, and

sometimes on my side of the glass it is perpetual summer.

Fish overheat, rise—a hard smear of silver. We

exist in the space of a fork pressed down into a baked day

and they

are muffled by repetition, but on rainy days

we notice their absence, the gap between two buildings now still water,

and we

are reminded of the way fish tails flicker only to disappear

through clouds, and I thought my side

of the glass was home, but sometimes I am a heavy piece of driftwood,

barely floating, and sometimes I am a shoe, caught in seaweed.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I am a large rock . . .

Sometimes I am a set of perfect waves, rolling in at the pace

of fabric by the metre

and they,

they are long, flat mango seeds, swimming . . .

Today I arrived and saw them singing and dancing to Steps,

packing down after days, months, of building something,

and I suddenly felt a desperate need to be beside

familial gills, taking oxygen in the water

of our shared histories, but by the time I had shut down my computer

they were gone

but still I rushed to the window and threw

my body against the glass, smashing repeatedly with all my strength,

hoping the heat from the long days

would have decreased the glass’s viscosity, so that the waters

could join, and what I mean is, sometimes I think about how we

will end up on our sides

in a sink, belly rising and falling.

How a knife pops the skin, quick as unpicking thread,

and how we only caught one side

of the reflection. When we’re gutted, innards yanked out and

tossed to the dogs, you might not know that I spent a lot of my days

wishing I had learnt to swim in your part of the water.

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