Janice Kang | midnight picnics | Poets Resist

Poets Resist
Edited by Logan February
July 19, 2019

Janice Kang

midnight picnics

in the mead softly lit by yonder's neon shop lights, we are made whole in strawberry jam & honeybees, blushing cheeks filled with nectar. & there are baby bells-song in the backdrop of this peach orchard plus incessant, sleepy chatter that one digests because we are kissing one another tonight, laughter tasting like sour tangerines. i peel back your mouth & brush my knuckles against your teeth, feeling the gloss, wondering, how in another time this could not have been. perhaps they would have better liked these hands as a fist against your cheeks, & i mean now, in this time, but my hands are thrushes or whichever bird you like best & i always did draw robins on tree-limbs, a little bird showing me home & tending to the peach orchard of my face. i blush when you hold my waist, tend to my hips & hover before me upon our checkered blanket. i kiss you wetly, feeling like pulp juice melting into me, or little juice boxes/juke boxes & our heartbeats are made of music boxes. one day i suppose all this will stop, having come to the end of these scales, no more unwinding to be done. all the while beneath these purple skies & smiles, to which these nights are blushing straight at us, feeling our minuscule human emotions & reflecting, like milk glass. i decide to rewind the box by kissing you again. each time, you taste like something new, metamorphosing into different loves, time & time again until i see that it is midnight & you are back with me again poking a little ripped tangerine slice into my mouth while you breathe against my nose like you are the low summer breezes. the music stops at five minutes past midnight & you cradle me against our blanket. all i can see is a shadow portrait of the trees & the neon shop lights & you, with the chilly uncanniness, my home, my breaths. the echo of our night, bleeding into one another's bone-bridges.

I come from an East Asian background, where homophobia is rampant, not only in my East Asian-American communities but especially back in my distant home. Korea has a certain “bullying culture” as well, and this emphasized violence is interwoven among soft words here to preserve the tender moments of LGBT love. Think of it as Seoul’s Queer Culture Festivals despite a conservative hatred, as a symbol of “Oh, nothing matters but our love.” This is a tender piece about a hated topic, so that we can remember what truly matters: love, in a place where I think of judgement and young violence being preferred to the romantic love between, for example, two girls.