by Amra Brooks

Sui Park, *Keyhole,* black cable ties, 59 in x 24 in x 4.5 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

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Amra Brooks | OCT 2022 | Issue 19

I bought a small round measuring tape in a yarn shop in Belfast, Maine. I didn’t need it. I am not an exacting type of a person. It is a shiny bright juniper like the greenest tourmaline. Translucent. It ticks and clicks when I pull out the wound white tape with red hatch marks. There are tiny ridges around its middle that help my fingers hold it in their grip. I wanted to lick it when I saw it glistening up at me, like hard candy or a precious gem. I often want to put clear shiny things in my mouth. Sometimes I go into a store and I tell myself that I can buy whatever I want. I feel exhilarated, even if I walk away with nothing. I’ve measured waists and wrists, inseams and necks. My measurements have changed since buying the tape on that trip two summers ago. It was a day that was too hot to touch wool. My hair was pulled up and off of my neck. I was numb and hollow from a family fight the previous day. Clear cold grief was pushing up through the muck of hot anger. My body, both weightless and heavy. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and while standing in the driveway at midnight, I saw the luminous slow motion flutter of a luna moth fly into a nearby tree. A sonic hush. Its wingspan the size of my hand with my fingers outstretched. It glowed an unnatural neon celadon. My dad, who was inside the house, told me that when he was little he stayed up with a white sheet and a flashlight to attract one, but I didn’t need a sheet. Just my sadness. There are certain things we cannot measure.

I can push a white button in the center of the tape that will release the measurement and wind it back up with no memory of the number. I don’t like to remember the number because it often changes. Always too big or too small, and being too much or not enough makes me feel shame. Like my shoulders are devouring my chest. I have never owned a scale. When I knit, I need to measure. It’s why I bought this irresistible green circle that I didn’t need because I had a plain and ordinary opaque red one that I did not want to lick. My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was eight or nine. I imagine we were in her den with the tv on and her Florida tanned feet up on the butterscotch naugahyde hassock. When she was no longer able to speak, I had her nurse hold the phone up to her ear when I called. I told her to wait. No one should die alone. When I arrived, she gripped my hand with a strength it didn't seem possible for her to have. I thought she didn’t want to let go, then the nurse said we all have that grip at the end.

I feel close to my grandmother when I have the needles in my hands, the yarn running through my fingers. The click and slide of the metal is her sound. She made me a sewing basket and glued shells she collected on the beach to its lid. Inside were pins stuck into a cloth strawberry shaped cushion, thread, scissors, and a folded yellow measuring tape. Sometimes I use a measuring tape when I try to sell clothes online for extra cash. People like to know exact inches. When my husband was a child, he asked his father about death and his dad drew a timeline on a napkin, and even though the life line was long, that finite end of the black ink mark has plagued him ever since. It was too concrete. A luna moth only lives for seven days. This measuring tape stops at sixty inches. I want to live to see the Aurora Borealis haunt the sky with purple and green, to feel my son’s body dwarf mine, and to meet unexpected creatures that stop time in the quiet dark.

Amra Brooks was born and raised in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California. Her autobiographical novella California was published by Teenage Teardrops in 2008. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Inventory, Printeresting, Ping Pong: A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, Entropy, This Long Century, index, the LA Weekly, The Encyclopedia Project, and other publications. She is the director of The Raymo Literary Series and co-produces and edits The Electro-Library Podcast. She has taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and San Diego, and Muhlenberg College. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at Stonehill College in Easton, MA where she is an Associate Professor. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction called Your Beginning and Your End and early excerpts can be found in Entropy Magazine and on This Long Century. Currently she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her family and spends New England winters dreaming of warm afternoons at the ocean, the color green, and ripe tomatoes.

Sui Park is a New York-based artist born in Seoul, Korea. Her work involves creating 3-dimensional flexible organic forms of a comfortable ambiance that are yet dynamic and possibly mystical or illusionary. Park has had several solo exhibitions and public art commissions including Immersion in Black and White at Sapar Contemporary in 2021. She has participated in over 130 exhibitions internationally. Park’s artwork has been acquired by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon and the Saks Fifth Avenue Flagship Store in New York. Numerous mentions of her work and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Vice and Colossal, as well as other publications. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary in New York City. Sui Park’s education includes an MDes in Interior Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Environmental Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sui Park also holds an MFA and BFA in Fiber Arts at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.