YUZUN KANG

American Embassy: Seoul, 2005(I)

There are faces in the window
with only one officer giving them breath to stay.

So stay  

with these names, spoken
like a talk between a man & his hands,
as if the news could be shed & handed off to someone else.

I know what it is to have a name
thrown so deep into a page,
into a number then numbers then birds
scattered into sky.

Nothing is written in the sky.
No birds turn into cues
for a silence on the other side—

I expect nothing in the court of miracles.
I will vowel & excite a famous sentence,
having no shape, except for this line.

I return without the sickness you look for in the sky.

Count the migrations. Repeat that number.

That is who I am.
 






Yuzun Kang currently lives in Baltimore where he works as narrative designer at Pure Bang Games. He holds a M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Virginia where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. His first manuscript, Konglish, received the 2005 Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. His poems and writings have been published in Phoebe, Racialicious, and No More Lives. (kangcakes@gmail.com)



Boxcar Poetry Review - ISSN 1931-1761