Gray Areas

BY EMILY JUNGMIN YOON

I want nothing to change, then wait for my life to change.

I move through gravel and mud
and arrive at the falls.

Unfattened yet
by rain, the water twists
its thin body over heathered rock.

I do not have a say in this.

Neither tourist nor local on this land,
I wonder at the beauty of this land

and wonder what the beauty of this land
has to do with me.

It took me years to commit to page my own history
and so I wonder how to write into my poem that palm

shading my house, that mother cardinal feeding
her young, who appears bigger than her

with his trilling puffiness, whose brown head
will soon burn red, just like hers,

that Jackson’s chameleon in the cloud forest
swaying as he walks, copying leaves in the wind,

his globular eye turning and turning,
that poison dart frog who has no poison

because of the diet here, that snail and
that toad sitting together in the rain,

discussing a secret—
without questioning their origins and place.

What do I have
to do

with this place?

It’s true even love has tired me before.
A tire I must pull through mud, water, sand.

I do not want to be strong. I want to lie down.
In the water. In the mud. In the sand.

I appeal to the ocean to release me of this fatigue.
I am holding on too much, too many,

the ocean says, pushing me out onto sand,
onto land where I splay my burning body.

Into the ocean two million tires pour out.

Off the coast of Florida, with the blessing
of the U.S. Army, to create a marine habitat.

A gold tire is dropped from a blimp
to christen this new cradle.

The tires, breaking loose and pummeled
by hurricanes and tropical storms,
choke corals, tumble onto sand.

Grief already too heavy a carriage to cradle reef.

I want my life
to be a poem. I want my life to be
a poem. The future of a poem is mystery.
Writing toward uncertainty, I locate beauty.
In this process I harvest joy.

Heavy rain floods Korea.
Heavy rain floods Libya.
Heavy rain floods Pakistan.

Watching the thin body of the polar bear on the thin body of ice,
the camera says, We can’t interfere with nature.

Let it starve.
Let it starve.
Let it starve.

In the gray flood the brown cow swims for the first time.

Atop the asphalt the escaped zebra runs for the first time.

The pearl stomach of the beached marlin touches sand for the first
time.

It is too dangerous to release a marlin into an ocean filled with
tourists.

Under “Harvest” on the NOAA Fisheries website, it says, Blue
marlin are a favorite

target for recreational fishermen, as the fish tend to put up an incredible
fight when hooked.

The kingdom in which I find myself feeds me
and loving it is at once easy and complicated.

Between wanting nothing and everything,

I lie in the sand. I stand from water.

In this process I harvest .

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, a finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Yoon is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Ploughshares, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. Yoon is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.

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