Conjunctions:75 Dispatches from Solitude

Five Poems
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
 

Cindy Juyoung Ok’s recent poems can be found now or soon in jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Bennington Review. She teaches creative writing in Iowa City and is assistant poetry editor at Guernica.