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.
