From the Styx memory foam
a girl stems, fumbling to get
why in the coil of what. Every
what twisting for its scaled tail.
From Thetis’s wedding to gravity’s
threshold, the girl travels, the world
unhinged like a door drowning
in its frame. Snakes skinned alive too
learn their bodies to be cartographic
loops. Apple, spiral slow, your nudity
an unmapped globe. Attached to its axis
is human life & its gatekeeper
with a slingshot targeting a fruit
the size of a four-month pregnancy.
Every craving of hers a sin for she dared
to reach beyond the eaves of his
comfort. Every era fenced-in until she
breaks in. Some nights tilt like stairs
to allow her down & across. What does
the orchard rattle for? What in god’s
name—windows stripped of life
house habits losing their names.
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life, selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press. She also won for her fiction the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Her recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Greensboro Review, the Kenyon Review, and Poetry, among others.
