Religion of Love
BY KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG
2024 Adroit Prize for Poetry Runner-Up
Selected by Ocean Vuong
“I loved the tenderness offered to all beings and their circumstances here. The poem achieves the rare and courageous act of refusing to judge or condemn, allowing its surprising and well-etched images (plates as petals!) to gain their own resonance in the mind. An excellent showcase of restraint and explicitness in one space, reminding us that both are possible—at times even needed.”
I thought I stopped believing in it
when I was five and saw my parents
hold each other’s hands and stagger
around the living room, screaming.
They tried to tell me later
they had been dancing,
but I knew what I saw.
At eighteen, when I began to sleep with men
for money, I remember
looking at the flies in the hotel ceiling light
and thinking I was just like them, trapped
in what I died believing was the sun,
and asking one of my regulars once
if he could tell me about his wife.
I thought if he just told me she was the love of his life
maybe the bed would catch fire and begin to speak
in the voice of love itself, and tell me
to leave that room and follow it as its prophet forever,
but when he did, the miracle
was the restoration of sight.
I saw myself as I was: not myself
but pleasure, a brief tollbridge out of the body
cars dropped off one by one into the river called shame.
In the cab home that night
I thought about the people whose job it was
to strip the bed after we had gone,
to wash everything clean,
and of my parents, how the broken dishes
around them on the floor like huge petals
were gone when I came downstairs the next morning,
and how they were dancing, in a way, and if I listened hard enough
I could almost hear the music they had been
dancing to, from a former paradise
where they could still have anything they wanted.
I didn’t see them, but I knew it was there,
it had to be, it was all there for us
when we arrived,
the little paper-wrapped soaps, the towels folded into swans again—
If there’s a religion of love I think that’s what it is.
Death with Dignity
BY KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG
We lived then in the first state
to legalize physician-assisted suicide,
and I remember watching the first person
to use it, on the news, the whole family
singing You Are My Sunshine,
and thinking, as a child, there is a door
out of this limited world
we could open. Or if not a door,
a human-size hole we could cut
into the barbed-wire fence, like the one
my father and I used to climb through
to pick blackberries which,
when I asked him once
whose berries they were, he said
they belonged to us because we were
brave enough to pick them, to come home
bleeding everywhere for a sweetness
we’d only briefly know
as it disappeared into us.
But what he really said,
out loud, I mean, was
I don’t think anyone cares.
And even this he said in another language.
He used to leave the house every night
to stand in the front yard for hours,
and I would stand at my bedroom window
watching him gaze into the empty street,
imagining the sound of the sprinklers
was really the sound of a distant ocean
inside him, wanting
to puncture him
and see his real self pour out.
To just ask him, for example,
if he had ever been in love.
And then disappear completely
into whatever he dissolved into.
I didn’t realize if I understood him
the way the body understands water
by drowning, sweetness
by eating, trespass by bleeding,
it would leave me
with nothing to want
to understand.
It takes a different kind of bravery
to know hunger all your life.
To allow whatever you want
to destroy and let destroy you
the small dignity of solitude.
I used to think the door would open
onto a sunlight that would explain everything
but now I know light
is not clarity,
light is light.
My father is my father,
irreducible and final. And not final.
Maybe he had been in love,
was still in love, maybe I was
crazy, his unhappiness
only a bedtime story I told myself
because for whatever reason
he couldn’t seem to tell me anything,
like the automatic transcriptions of voicemails
he’d leave me, the Korean grocery lists
forced into English nonsense
except for the endings which would say
bye bye, love you—
But I did ask him once,
years later, in Korea, by the river,
under the light of stars, news of distant fires
that had already ended long ago
to name the happiest time of his life.
He said it was those years when we almost knew
how to love each other.
Of course, that’s not what he said.
He said those years in Oregon when you were so young.
