The ashes belong to me.
Not what goes up in flames, but the soot.
The abacus of myrtle counting
down to droopage, ruin
in rain that bulbs all surface
tension with light–it’d be long
before any of that fits.
Salt of driftwood.
Not a mere pant.
Nor bodied.
Here comes the chant:
let your pain be
your prophet telling truths
no one wanted over
the cackle of children you don’t love
likely for none belongs to you.
How much life fits in one backpack.
The moon’s sooted forehead
I’m left writing into a stray
swarm of bees.
Snow marrow
inherited by blood.
Soothed right, left, then wrong.
Here: one of us, one of us.
What words to my name, what
world, if any.
Cassandra Dear by Suphil Lee Park | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser Set
- Suphil Lee Park (수필리박 / 秀筆李朴) is a writer and translator from South Korea. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Other Test of Time (forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2027) and Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023). She also translated An Unraveling of One, an anthology of pre-20th-century Korean women’s poetry (forthcoming from TRP, 2027). https://suphil-lee-park.com/






