Collage of Seoul. Jae Newman

Collage of Seoul - Jae Newman


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      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


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