On a Scale of Nothing to All
Suphil Lee Park
| poetry
Part of childhood remains
buried under sandcastles.
You used to poach
grasshoppers with an old hairnet
until it caught strands
of cobwebs and would not let go.
Memories are but hearsay.
So is a sachet that used to contain
scented soaps. So is
every emotion, even your own.
Only by intuition you know anger,
awake, splinters like sleep’s
exoskeletons in the morning.
Under your window
spiderlings fiddle down
a rose stem after rain, so much at stake.
There you stand
lobbing a tennis ball, as sure
of gravity as of dusk
that shivers inshore, searching
for a glade to fathom
the rest of the forest against.
Suphil Lee Park is a bilingual writer who grew up in South Korea and graduated from NYU with a BA in English and from New Writers Project (the University of Texas at Austin) with an MFA in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Global Poetry Anthology, and the Massachusetts Review, among many others. Her debut collection of poetry, Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize, is forthcoming in 2021.