Abigail Pak

If It Were Anything Else

If it were anything else, I’d have left it
alone somewhere, like a jacket in a diner.

I’d have crashed it like a wave against rock,
torn it like a kite against the apathy of a tree,

separated it like a boulder from the earth,
dropping off the face of a sea cliff where
a tourist blocks the view.

But it’s my heart. It cries for everything.

A mouse in a belltower must think the whole
world is shaking with the gentlest of wind,

and yet the song keeps it from leaving.
The cracks let the light in by a crescent sun.

It lays in its nest, the raven flys by without a
word, and the ache keeps me up till morning.

February Fishbowl Garden

fish seed

Miles of poppies open fins on highway hills flooded with
rain. Grass sings sweeter after the burning, like the first open
window after months where socks are heavy enough
reason to stay in bed. Can you see the fish head clouds
swallowing our sadness till the exhaust spirals home?

bone seed

Take the snake rattles lost in the canyon and the buttoned
heads of mushrooms who speak only of kindness. Watch them
whisper things only they know—rindy aftertaste of memory,
why the earthworm cries, how lovely the green Death painted
her floors to remind herself of something she can never quite
remember.

coral seed

Under a dry branch, tap to hear what our bones are made of,
full of burrows for ordinary things. The light of foggy headlights.
Mud tracked in the living room. Rice spooned in with soy sauce,
sesame oil, and egg yolk. Heavy hands. Song of the frog
whose wet feet slapped this page and fell in.

bowl seed

The sun pouring itself into the hollow of a turtle shell. Cover it
and cup it in your hand. If you listen carefully, you can hear it
hum. I catch the leftover light with a few murmured praises
and use its edge to open a can, finding a love so perfect inside,
I never want anything else to touch my lips again.

Tuesday

I drop my brother off at the train station, sweep
               eucalyptus from the patio. For months, the toyon
by                       the low Spanish wall grew its red berries—
clustered

 
like spoons of ikura, bubbles of bright.
               From the window, I spot swaying leaves in
otherwise stillness. Robins and waxwings
hang
 
               on the branches, coming and going, like tiny
delusions,          bobbing trapezists with clouds in their claws.
Down shell beaks,
 
berries go quickly, as if the bitter fruit tastes
               closer to mana. I stand, like a child in a parade, to
catch                   something clearer, but like a misplaced
spring,
 
the tree explodes—
               splatters of ink in an ocean of sky—now bare, now
empty,                 like nothing had ever been there
at all.
 
And something touches me where parched stone meets
               water in the place I hide my discarded selves,
ghosts                  of who I thought I’d become. I should’ve
thought
 
something grand. Like,
               this must be grief in the face of an unchanging rock.
 
But all I could think about was a story a poet once
               told me, of his brother who lost his fingers to a cold
mountain,             how, after so many years, he could never find
the words.
 

Abigail Pak is a queer, California-based writer. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Westmont College and has had pieces published in Phoenix Magazine, The Inkslinger, Apricity Magazine, and The ANA.