I have not come this far
in self-definition
to risk it all on one move,
but my spirit
knows why I must try.
Here I am, directing
two forces in opposition:
push and pull.
I know this. I am this
and yet,
I struggle to keep pace,
a move behind
the man on a video,
a master
whose breath is invisible,
if taken at all.
Aureole
This same poem, unsaid,
in a thousand lonely mouths,
each holding a pencil
torching lead love letters
in long, arching graphite rainbows.
Jasmine leaves shade the light
but when the sun sets,
when everything is dark,
when my eyes are worthless,
my heaven is always only
an inch away from the world.
It is the distance my fingers travel
when I touch your spine,
the center of the universe,
reciting those archaic words, I love you.
Adrenal ash spread over the lip
of a blue flame; love; water
on the orchid of wanting
to be found and clipped by you.
This vase, Pyrex, is a bed, of course,
as my hand, lost in the tectonics of your back,
removes the cosmos with my daily trespass,
as fingers climb that little mountain
where enlightenment is held in an open box
by Aurora, who greets me coldly,
in white gloves. Even a goddess knows
that her hands are not fit to hold my love of you,
the words of a love child
closing the distance of a god
down to the length of a ring finger.
Postage
Leafing through pages
of a phone book in dream,
I cut my tongue on a Korean War stamp
before noticing
a million of them,
spilling from the blackness of a woman’s purse.
Collage of Seoul
Taped over the headboard, eleven photos
of her neckline
a river splashing through
the wound.
Framed in a golden tomb, the cries of my mother
freeze most specks of traffic.
Tiny cars
pass over bridges, some
never return.
Adrift
Cottonwood in static suspension—
it covers the neighbor’s lawn.
Mid-May, we talk of moving
again. She says we should stay
and I always want to go
somewhere new
and redefine ourselves perpetually
as newlyweds, as
the couple who can not
see its shadow.
Outside the window, floating in the air
the whispers of dead dandelions
mowed down
reminds me of another time,
another spring
before I had allergies
when staring at strange snow falling up
might have touched the chord,
an echo on my spine.
Hikikomori
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
–Thoreau
Following blue footprints
painted on cold sidewalks,
I disappeared behind an old hospital.
Laying on a white H,
I searched the sky
for helicopters or falling stars.
Removing shards of parental debris,
I covered my torso in snow,
buried what sought translation, escaped
a body I never wanted
or felt was mine. It’s easy to mistake
electricity as light. Harder
to convince a flower it’s fine,
a lamp is the sun.
There are one hundred twelve varieties of the lie
and I am not above a few.
How many clung to me as I stood?
Drawn toward a playground,
I touched chains upholding swings,
set metal in motion.
I have no business being here.
Land of the Morning Calm
There is no want in me but for you:
drag a honeycomb through my hair,
deaden all thoughts of dismantling
this stinger in my spine. Mother,
they bleached you into obscurity. Infants
don’t fly, and so, you painted stripes on me,
made me a Korean bee with a quiet stinger
to help me collide with the Yellow Sea.
When I am torn up about who I am,
I take comfort where comfort stings,
sit alone at sunset watching a black sky
swallow tiny silver planes, but nothing
can keep me from swarming the aviary,
a Buddhist bumblebee in the dead of February.
One Hundred Words for Snow
I whisper Yhwh against a rage
that has cost me more than fingers and toes.
I could not hold, bury, or escape
the shape of your