Two Poems by Eddie Kim

Minimax

On a beach in Okinawa a super typhoon is coming.
I apply two layers of SPF 50 sport waterproof.
The coast is ours and the waves mischievous.
I feign little mind to the literal red flag
tattering above an empty life guard tower.
Fear of death is what reminds you, after all,
about living. My parents paced the decades
through rain with umbrellas over my brother and me.
Is there a difference between the things we live for
and the things we die for?

I watch my nephew build sandcastles
close ashore, each reaching tide
dissolves turret after turret.
I suggest he move further inland because
grown ups draw lines in the sand.
He laughs at my lines.
He’s unafraid of losing precious,
and his shovel always returns to earth.
He’s unconcerned with perfection.
His father and I drink envy with flying foxes and fire.

I stopped being a beach person
sometime after moving to Kotzebue.
Instead of sand turrets, my brother and I dug snow tunnels,
watching a fortress of clichés ascend
out of ocean and shatter onto shore.
That was the last year I remember
christmas feeling like Christmas.
And hearing my parents quarrel,
I learned the fear of words,
in both languages.

Somewhere beneath an umbrella, my grandmother dies.
I am wakened by the smell of iron from my father’s bloody handprint
on our toilet seat, the door cracking freshness of splintering woe.
I collect hobbies of avoidance—model airplanes,
pyrography. I love the safety in their burning. Bouquets
drifting inebriation, fabricated and chemical,
an olfactory of mass production,
the other elemental and slow. Scorched wood
wafts like nudity and tree butter through nose hairs.
But I am not a craftsman.

And these aren’t crafts that quick in boxes—
the boxes we bury above ground, but won’t throw away.
Moving boxes are corrugated escape pods—I never throw them away.
Once, I thought I might let them go,
but, I was more okay with letting her go.
Or, maybe I didn’t know how to ask her to stay?
The past lets you go if you let it.
I’ve lost the feeling of home so many times—
home is smoke and petrichor. I assume we live for or die for
all the things we can’t fit in boxes.

When I returned to Kotzebue, the restaurant,
buildings, dirt roads, and burned down houses
had grown short of breath.
In the past, swings were taller,
slides plunged deeper, beds stretched broader,
the buildings stood slightly akimbo and had eyes.
Somebody has shifted all the furniture
a quarter turn. Now, I’m all grown up and only cash has eyes.
I approach the window where I shattered glass
into a friend’s eye. I am punching at blind ghosts.

I can’t always tell the difference between dream and rerun.
Live for or die for? My dad’s CRT TV still hangs in the corner
of our old restaurant, it holds onto each.
I’m hedging my bets, even in sleep. One leg tucked securely
under scotch and sleeping-bag flap,
the other beckons breeze, sober as snowfall.
But there is no force in the universe stronger
than a child spinning circles in sand, just to see what will happen.
Capable of bending time to will, and breaking Zeus’s boldest bolt.
My arm covers my face, nose in the crook of my elbow.

I smell the salt air. I court sleep, but I can’t get comfortable.
A super typhoon is coming.

Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it
makes sense
-Gary Zukov

According to quantum mechanics, without us,
there is no light. Light does not do, and we do not exist
without interaction. We are nothing if not tendency.

~

On my best days, I choose belief in every meaning.
My dreams put in work, from dragon to Jedi,
they are as real as all my day jobs, and no less peculiar.

~

They say a particle in motion is only seen
the way we choose seeing it,
lost in our reality, only as it seems.

~

The older I get, the more it seems the only way
of becoming a proper adult is by deep-frying
and consuming dragonfly wings for profit.

~

Wings are made up of atoms,
but atoms are made up of imagination,
which we’re taught holds no matter.

~

Fire is not matter. It is not thing.
Fire is the smell of time—its hair turning to ash.
I almost burned down our house when I was six.

~

I’d like to live in a tree house for one year,
amongst the apparitions of birds and my fear of heights,
sleeping with dreams I realize later were thought of earlier.

~

Gravity is the weakest of any Universe’s binding spells
but holds our solar system together. Gravity doesn’t have time
for subatomic particles, or the difference between kale and chocolate.

~

Any reality, atom or law, can be broken, if you’re fast enough.
Which is why some people eat with such speed.
Our stomachs are never truly empty, neither are they full.

*

Eddie Kim received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is a
Kundiman fellow from Seattle. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Margins,
The Collagist, Pinwheel, Narrative Magazine, and others. His poem, ‘Telephone of the Wind,’
was featured on Tracy K. Smith’s show, The Slowdown.