Vast Oceans
He spent more than half his youth, just
pursuing, building walls, living
a life of luxury, every moment a cinematic
fantasy, building up what he
considered to be
independent, keeping his capelet
billowing in the strongest
steadiest of winds
over the vast oceans
and the bitterest icebergs, because
people called him unsinkable, and
he was a god, and he was made from the finest
carbon metal, pearls from the heart of the ocean,
little children dancing the waltz
with their fathers like little ladies with
missing front teeth, coated with the blackest
paint and the goldest of plates,
and the people called him as magnificent
as the ship of dreams—
—until he met her.
I once read that the hole in the Titanic
was no bigger than a human figure.
Strangers
While the first yellow leaves
stare from their unforgetting,
and summer starts to become nothing
more than a hallucination, I myself
start to unforget. Familiar strangers start to recur
on the walls, and it’s funny—
because I’ve been making new strangers
wherever I go. Like the sentimentalist I
am, I cry over these strangers. I cry
over their dead friends and
brothers and sister, because everybody’s got dead people,
and it tastes bitter: like when you keep toothpaste
on the inside of your cheek for too long. And
now what? Faces swarm like deadly hornets
into haunted smears of color, painting an ugly portrait of what could easily be
a grotesque image of a monster that only exists in my world
and my world only. Blue and purple limbs and delicate,
stitched skin around the eyes dotted with makeup, while
twisted in all the wrong angles, like some thing
drawn by Picasso.
I’ve never really liked Picasso.
No Win
You know that game,
Where you think of it,
You lose?
You’re welcome,
By the way. And Welcome,
To my life.
Only, it’s not one thing,
It’s a huge list, I’m
The only one playing.
It’s not a game,
And I always
Lose.
About the Author:
Yoon Park is a dynamic high school student enrolled at Seoul Academy in Seoul, South Korea. She channels her creative energy into writing and visual art and finds joy in expressing herself through these mediums. Additionally, she has a passion for music and spends her spare time playing the piano. Her dedication to her craft has earned her recognition and admission into the prestigious Sewanee Young Writers Conference.