EN ROUTE by Suphil Lee Park

With its scent the acacia tunnel bends air.

She enters, not bent.

                             Mother, tongue

                             of a bell never asleep: Betrayer, you

                             have betrayed. She can no longer tell her name

                             and wallpaper apart.

God is motion: twigs

growing up, past and not into each other.

At each end the tunnel reaches in and out. An idea

willed to cast a shadow

stretched across centuries with fluctuating gradations.

                             Why not brighter, why not

                             thunder longer.

The white ash stands spiked

with string bulbs.

                             No one else in town saw ghosts

                             sprout out the tree, trapped

                             alight. Shadows of blood clustered under like gifts.

                             Prise open your throat, they chanted, and choked

                             on electrical cords.

She withdraws here, her mind

reaching across itself. 

It is a hard

fact: hunger has tusks, tears.

In the thicket birds were taloned to death.

                             How to ever backstroke to shore. How to find

                             a land soaked not in blood, far

                             from the dead. Their world is a string

                             searching for the kite

                             in their eye sockets.

The air is no longer bent–her being, as bent, here.

The tunnel stirs alive with starved insects.

A beekeeper knows each colony, alive with one

hunger, is a taste

of its own on the tongue.