Back to Issue Forty

Space Music

BY MARK KYUNGSOO BIAS

Lately, life is ordinary.
My words are mechanical over dinner plates

at social gatherings. The party. The people. I can’t digest it.

*

On the news, the anchor speaks a massacre.

The body count climbing as the microwave
beeps. Then an infomercial for bathrobes.

I tiptoe around the screaming
engine.

*

The air is in flux with the mind.
The heart and its jurisdictions are erased.

*

My answer to the inevitable
question: I am okay.

*

The dying are never saying goodbye
because it takes something from the living.

Everything orbits the next delusion.
Already dead, but still in transit.

*

The sickness does not enter. I step into it, leaving
my footprints at its teeth.

I am afraid of what the air will do to me.

*

With his last breath, my grandfather says, lunker.
A lake of wine, cedar bark, cigar smoke. He revisits and vanishes.

*

I am having one of those mornings
when I place the past inside a box
and place the box on my desk, waiting
for something to happen.

*

I am vicious,
laced with death like everyone else.

*

Darkness falls over everything except the front yard where
a square of light opens the grass.

*

Down the hall, the past is barking at the front door.
The hall becomes a river to wade, a smear of color.

 

 

Mark Kyungsoo Bias is a Korean American poet and educator. He is a 2021 Tin House Scholar and a recipient of the William Matthews Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Asheville Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Common, and PANK, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate and REAL Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Poetry Consultant at Grub Street. Find him on Instagram (@markbias)

Next (Sarah Kay) >

< Previous (Melissa Cundieff)