Jemma Paek

I blink.

In the demi-semi-second between closing and opening my eyes, I watch her as she stands by the sink, squeezing halved lemons into the crystal jug on the kitchen counter. They are the size of her fist and vaudeville yellow. As she stabs them meticulously with the three-pronged fork (the most useless of all kitchen utensils) her left hand index finger, plaster-clad thanks to a recent encounter with a serrated knife, sticks out in the opposite direction and jars her movements slightly. It is not yet dawn; the moon still looms through the open window in the wall in front of her, and the trees are half-lit with weary eerie silver. She finishes squeezing the lemons - exactly twelve crescent lemon carcasses are stacked on top of each other now - and begins pouring in the sugar.

She listens to the saccharine sprinkling as the granules tumble over each other, out of their paper bag and into the jug. Some get caught on the lemon-wetted sides and catch the light. She uses a long wooden chopstick to begin stirring the two ingredients together. Now, the sugar melting into the juice with a soft shimmering and the rhythmic thud of the chopstick hitting the crystal, she turns towards her packet of Marlboros, deftly removes a cigarette with one hand, then uses the same hand to turn on the hob in its small scale explosion, bends over, lights her cigarette, turns it off again.

And then my eyes open.

Lonely and pale on the muddy bank
Of the silver February river
There was a single broken sliver
Of old Agivey brick.

How had you arrived there?
Not placed nor dropped by a passing load,
You must have come from within the Bann
Where, sunk and silent deep below
Its mirror top, you began
To erode.

Shunted slowly down the stream
And churned and picked and worn
By the passing fish and flow
Until the thickening rains and rising flood
Raised you up and laid you out
A pale orange, worn down sliver
By the side of the passing river.

Interval
In those fifteen minutes
I thought I saw it all:
Each cog whirring its way around
Plot lines and set design
Until it reached an earnest nod
And all were in agreement.

On the left, a mind drifting
Out of the auditorium and back
Through the day’s gaps and mishaps
Before a pause, then a glance forward
From the lull of the here and now, which -
She thinks - only preface the night somehow.

And over by the bar,
On his second glass and
Rehashing extracts from the first act,
Immersed in what he has seen, heard,
Can feel taking form as, towards the next half,
He directs hypotheses and prophecies.

Even the few who nosed through
Actors’ names and dates of birth
Remained part of it still.
The youngest so engrossed
That their disbelief, suspended,
Insisted it was real.

In those fifteen minutes
I thought I saw it all:
When each came up for air and
Hung in the balance between
The before and after;
The point at which the play stalled,
Took stock, then drove on forward
To the end, and a curtain call.

Rome, In Between Places

Yes, rambling in your city, I can say “ciao”,
“buongiorno” with a bad accent, bad spelling.
Your masterpiece of a tongue
Is a mystery to me.

The words, labyrinthine,
Like your streets
A maze.
I lose myself in them:
Red coat seeing the dirty, roaring red of your sky.

All I know is that I am inauthentic

Overwhelmed, I sit in all the wrong places: 
“Grazie”: deliberate, thought.
I sit in all the wrong places.

How can I find you?
These words, written, are the only I speak to you.
And how could you know these foreign marks, combinations, sounds?

Yes, rambling in your city, I can say “ciao”,
“buongiorno” with a bad accent, bad spelling.
Your masterpiece of a tongue
Is a mystery to me.

A map of words, worlds.
I am going in circles.
Exploring the guide-books
Not the city.
How can I find you when I only know how not to?

Silk
You, whose eyes so often
Surprised me, whose
Touch always softened
My darkest moods;

You are no more,
And I, as they say,
Am less.

No has been said a cure
For addicts, whose
Contention, grossly immature,
Cannot resist the bruise.

But no more now,
No less, and not no,
As they say, but yes;

For I have seen the mights
Of your eyes, the silk
Of your sheets, the lights
That disguise your ilk,
                                                                                
And so it seems
That I, as they say,
Am yours, and no more
In between. 

"in between"