Ars Poetica as Things I Wanted to Tell You
On our first date when you pointed out the finches
the ground we were sitting on became thousands of tiny birds.
In Ancient Greek we learn to pronounce words
by increasing difficulty: beginning, persuade, sleep, time.
Billboard for hospital says
We've rehearsed your heart surgery thousands of times.
Billboard for car dealership says
I know people buy cars elsewhere, but why?
Remember when you kept calling your apartment our apartment
like it wasn't only your name on the lease?
I watched this production of Macbeth the other day
where one guy sits naked in a bathtub and plays everybody.
I watched that movie last night where the director's wife leaves
and he stages an exact theater reproduction of his life.
During the class virtual reality tour of the Parthenon my goggles didn't work
so I just sat there staring into static imagining everything.
An actor points into the dark of the audience
saying look at that beautiful blue sky.
There are species of birds so endangered
they have to be socialized with puppets of themselves.
In all the poems after I kept directing the you:
Try it again, with more feeling this time.
It means "to carry" so all the freight trucks in Greece
say metaphor, metaphor, metaphor.
When you left, everything was losing you,
even birds, even having you.
I’m finding pieces of a dead language
in everything I say.
Accident Report
He specialized in collisions
and on our third date, told me about the first time
he smelled burning human flesh at the site of a crash
and I was still in love with someone else;
there is no good time or other way to say that.
He said it was one of those things
you know instantly without needing
to have known it before, a reality
you don't want to recognize but your body,
at some point, will. The smell of flesh
on fire, he meant, but it also applied to love,
its memory burning through our nights,
following us through every country he flew us to
until one night I found another girl's body
open on his phone, next to the sink
as though waiting to tell me everything
while in the other room he slept
in a bed belonging to no one.
Sometimes, people who survive
major crashes go into shock, the body refusing
to realize the fact of its ruin, and insist
they're fine, get up, walk away, go home,
then later that night a lung gives out
and they begin to choke. Like how I did then
on my own laughter, its thick gray fumes
obscuring its reason, the pileup I had made
of my life. I wanted
to be angry, to discover what we'd done for months
had been enough, at least, to hurt me
but more than that I wanted
him to walk through the door—no,
it would have been enough just to hear his voice
outside the bathroom window, I would have
smashed the fire extinguisher glass of it
and crawled, hands bleeding, gratefully
back to my good life. Instead
he drove down his dream’s endless highway
and I laid down next to him
like a wreck, astonished at itself
on the shoulder of the road.
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon. Her work can be found in ONLY POEMS, Shenandoah, and The Columbia Review, among others.