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Surviving Inklings
Cindy Juyoung Ok
You lose friends to both
death and unusually lively
withdrawal, as well as give

some up, as anticipated,
to misunderstanding. You
leave those you assured

you would not leave and,
too, people have left
you in silence and without

reason but presumably
because of your intensity,
which you have long heard

from friends, never lovers,
for whom it was the draw.
When you leave you rarely

think about those left, so
perhaps it is like that for
those who leave you:

typically no story, with
every tensile explanation
partial, each narrative

convenient, and changing.
You reserve the secrets
of theirs you remember,

pray occasionally for their
families, and praise silently
some whistle of generosity

you witnessed. You forget
the contours slowly, in
the long second leaving,

neutrality a structure
you learned to glamorize,
the way you have come to

imagine doors as rectangular.
Under limits of the boxy
entry, you think of cities

as grids, describe a bird as
the tint of ink, forgetting
that ink can be any color.
from the journal POETRY
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Cover of Maricela Guerrero's book, The Dream of Every Cell, translated by Robin Myers
"Dreams of Cells and Wolves"

"The book calls for dissent, mourning 'the biodiversity that suffers the kinds of transfers calculated in agroeconomic offices where no dissenting voices sound.' Yet, a generous spirit enumerates what forms such dissent might take; like the wolves they so often reference, these poems are playful yet fierce. This is experimental linguistic research in action."

via POETRY NORTHWEST
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Color image from the Favorite Poetry Project
What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on the Favorite Poem Project

"I think of Emiko Emori’s video of a Cambodian-American high school student reading 'Minstrel Man' by Langston Hughes, David Roderick’s video of a bomber pilot who served in Vietnam reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s 'Facing It' at the Vietnam Memorial, Natatcha Estébanez’s videos of a U.S. Marine reading 'Politics' by William Butler Yeats, and of a construction worker reading from Walt Whitman’s 'Song of Myself.'"
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