The following is one of five poems by Cindy Juyoung Ok featured in Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude.
Sunset, Glory
There is a heavily chandeliered
gas station in California, and if
you wonder if the night manager
has any new obsessions lately,
one is positioning the trade-off
between flexibility and strength
as a modern development, and
another is considering talk of
weather as a way of making
mood public in other places (like
we use traffic). Also, a dosed
expansion of the octave range.
And then a joke I won’t share
now because it only works
if you agree the idea of god is
hilarious. Mine: care as control,
moth wrestling as pageantry,
the intricacy of wiring the moon
would require if we lit it
ourselves, and scheduling
space to mourn a migraine as
it ends—the calm—the ceiling far,
and jeweled, and bright, brighter