“Divine Travesty” by Noah Chang

Floor 1

Love is like a rubber duck:

squeeze her like a lemon,

slice her cigarette butt,

let her slap your cheekiness,

and the other too, Jesus-said.

with three or some more sacrifices,

she’ll grant you a kiss and a curtain, silhouetted, you fall in love with its shape.

Floor 2

“Do you love me?” means one of three things:

1. The lover wants an answer from Love

2. The lover opens the side door

3. The lover leaves the car, and you missed how sweet coffee once was.

Floor 3

When you’re high of love, it’s hard to breathe.

Because your dad is crushing your spine, while

his breath smells like Vodka,

he shoves in twenties in your pocket like uncle,

scratches his shortly trimmed mustache on your soft skin. His kiss marks make

you ticklish. now you have oily skin, wider shoulders, a deeper voice, and no

one left to hug you.

Floor 4

Pink rubber kitchen gloves,

gifted from the supermarket from a sale event,

She wears them as if it is her royal gift- made out of church headdress- his

loyal son. The dishes squeak and scramble over eggs and ketchup, bubbly milk

and sticky rice. Her back is bent, arches that used to seem stronger than

bridges,

Fingers wrinkled, bent like a witch’s nose,

Lines that draw on her face become your fingerprint.

Basement

Agape, the highest form of love,

the love that reasons God to love Satan,

the love of Chochelin building the Eiffel Tower as if he'd never reach heaven,

the love that makes your tongue burn on dry ice,

is stuck in the lowest forms of art,

the art under a pig’s mud bath,

the art under the swamp’s lost penny,

the art under museums made by five dollar white paint.

Watch out,

when the priest turns around,

while umbrella’s sing hymns,

you’ll close the verses to kiss the ground,

to realize the next day that the plague has killed your lovers except for you, at

your happiest, euphoric state.

Noah Chang is an undergraduate student and a philosopher at the University of Michigan. He produced numerous historical documentaries and research papers regarding topics about Korean comfort women, Covid-19 and climate change, and the Coordinate Axes model: humanism vs materialism. Furthermore, he researched topics like Nepal’s microdust problems, overfishing and overexploitation of BFT in the Mediterranean Sea. He had been published in The Revolutionary Review and participated in the Macksey Symposium. He quotes himself as an avid reader of philosophy, but he wasn't able to finish reading Hegel, Nietzche, and Kierkegaard.