SEUNGBIHN PARK

Boxing Pandora

Seungbihn Park | poetry

You keep my dreams in that pocket-sized room,

just large enough to fit a bed, a desk, and a child’s

body. Ever since numbers became more than fingers

and apples, I’ve held the beating sun against the glass

window. The world as I know it is between my thumb

and index. The hours unfold on the spoiled wood

of the desk, where I have etched my middle name

and the year when I reach the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.

My math teacher tells us to travel the world, in the small

globe I see through the screen. The destination is set

anywhere but here. In my afternoon dreams, sand pearls

web my toes closer to the body in the distance, the fat

of the whale, glistening among the hard leather

of the beach. I picture the brittle earth between leaves,

waking the callus maturing on the soles of my feet.

This window had taught time and her silhouette

as a thicket of clouds knitted to the blue, that holy,

reckless child I could never catch. At times the sky

bruises with the screams of our brothers and sisters,

seeping through window seals and gnawing at the strings

that thread my room. My mother comes in with sliced

apples and promises me of life, flesh and sense bathed

in the sand, unspoiled.

Picture-Perfect

Seungbihn Park | poetry

She is here beside the open window, as the wind pares
off the leather from the stool, while she roots her spine
upright in the half-eaten sponge underneath. If she
were to ask why she could still spot the eggshell light
on my canvas, I cannot carry the words. So her eyes
stream across the white cloth to the wild meadow
outside, one that belongs to my landlord—Mr. Kim
—who has not come back from last year’s vacation.
The green of the grass slashes against the thicket of ash,
and for once, I contemplate the unbroken hue, the kind
that seems out of reach. As I let my brush boil the raw
pasture onto the porcelain frame, the years of youth unfold
in a single stroke.