INVISIBLE CARTOGRAPHIES

Believe me, I tried 
            to praise        the material world: 
transplanted 
            rose of sharon, hollowed       oxtail, dimlit 
mouth                         of the subway, 
            dark corners                          of karaoke bars, 
                       even the overbrassed statue set like a tacky buckle 
in the center   of the park.                                          The automated voices 
                      declaring                outbound stops 
                                                                            like horoscopes 
                                                     or rosaries. Tell me, 
do you prophesy           or plead?                 The skin of then 
            and now fragile as film forming 
                         on the surface of the stock pot. 
How easily it might tear. 

IN THE VALLEY

Delicate as a silk sheet, moonlight dusts the creekbed.
A bear print. Curtains of lichen. All these trails

eventually meet, going outward, toward
the mountains, or folding in on themselves.

*

When you return
the day splits like a thunderegg
with a miniature borealis inside.

Evening overgrown
as your mother’s bamboo grove.

All your old loves become crowded,
whole galaxies trapped inside a rock.

*

Where trails fork, cairns rise like empty altars.
And the creeks, choked with snowmelt, loiter into pools.

Under every dewed bush, mushrooms
as large and strange
as a prophecy multiply unseen in the shadows.

*

The veins in your hands, thin vines.

*

August to October a raging fever seizes the watershed.
The highway a gallery of ravaged metal—the ruins of auto shops,
twisted and charred vertebrae.

What is a hometown but the headstone
of some imperfect past?

*

Absence like a tarp stretched wide, keeping
water from inside.

The place where the snow was,
gaping.

The body of each raindrop,
not a body.

GWISIN SPEAKS WESTWARD

Unhewn edges of this world, I was 
hemmed in, snagged like a leaf decomposing 
downstream. Caught like fibrous fruit in the teeth.

So circular my labor, like the sliced lotus root,
that spoked celestial chart. Yet it goes without saying

I left much undone. The legends speak truthfully: 
I am a mass of wanting. The curdled energy 
of severed prayers. Do not be afraid. This does nothing 
to distinguish me from the living.

                                                                                   And you, you desire to be a good daughter? 
                                                                              To make useful the flighty home of your body? 
                                                                                                         To glimpse the world tenderly 
                                                                                               from within empire’s cold contours?

                                                                                           You, so far from your ancestors’ bones:
                                                                                        I am speaking to you from across the sea. 
                                                                    You, whose grandmother’s thirteen siblings are dying 
                                                                                          in America. You, kinetic and untethered,
                                                                                                  racing blizzards through Wyoming. 
                                                                                    Brazen, weighed down in bright winter silk, 
                                                                                              grown soft in the gathering of fortune.

                                                                                               I am not your faceless mirror. I resist 
                                                                                          your attempts to inhabit my orbit. Leave 
                                                                                                         me here. See how longing only 
                                                                                                                  fabricates a map of return. 

Megan Kim is a poet from Southern Oregon. She is the editor of Frontier Poetry and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and she has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.