By Cindy Juyoung Ok

When you leap over the deer carcasses
that line every garden, you will marvel
at their tidiness, at how bloodless a death
by drought can be. When I crawl through
the highway pieces shattered by heat,
I will admire the clean slits as I kick
aside crumbles of broken stone with little
blistering. When you thread between
the overtaken shores and bodies of elders,
frozen, when I follow the fallen saplings’
directions toward the horizon where
colorless sky and earth meet, we will
remember rippling at the birthday parties
for corporations and framing the ash
of beloved photos burnt in wildfire. When
we think of crossing the river to each
other, you from the gorge of the landslide
to me at the crest of the typhoon, it is then
we will find ourselves in a dead imaginary,
in some fictive past where the  you exists,
where I   is not a myth we use to keep
surviving at the cost of bird and glacier,
home and tenderness. Having ruined
the future of  becoming fossils, finally
we will know that it is for nothing we
die, never in place of drowned sea
turtles or swarming locusts, or to foil
cancerous sand and mold, not even for
the dance of subway floods or the graceless
eclipse of all our promises and planets.

Poet Bio

Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, translates, and teaches creative writing. She is a reviewer for Harriet Books. See More By This Poet