Soyoung Kim, Sometimes You Must Leave The Garden (Artist Website, Instagram, Twitter)
Acrylic on canvas, 50” x 50” x 1.5”
an elementary door with cracked seeded glass
Between fingers blood rubbed a straight line
Inside the slap of flip-flop on stippled grey marble
Into the ratty fountain
Skum of algae
Down her legs
Inside her nose
dust puffs
flared
From a race at full sprint
down three steep hallways
the international school building's curve
who could do it walking
Above brown ratty carpet
she runs all the way down
and jumps each ledge to cafeteria
Lift off an exhilaration
Later she stepped full
and barefooted on a rat
At midnight
(Once regarding the roller blades she was chased by the guard)
Before she walked home past
the guard dog
(next to a tin bowl of rice porridge
and thin cuts of meat)
Before pop machine without oh baek won
cold Ambasa
cold aloe juice
According to what you heard
With respect to the dead and the ghosts
draped in white linen, white cotton,
They hover over the basketball courts
Before she started playing basketball
Or volleyball
But after her dad's team
sewed the ribbons
to their sleeves
After the
beautiful long-haired girl
was crushed in the department store
collapse in 1995
(She'd never known anyone dead)
When she walked back to her apartment
at night
and thought she saw
the Old Lady of the Mountain
floating past
The long gone workers under rice paddies
And what of the displaced graves
According to what you heard
In the rolltop desk a navy blue passport
Underneath some paper
Apart from Inside of From nowhere
She's in an apartment As well as a school
She's
among Koreans and she's not
She's on the sidewalk
she's in the taxi she's a pieced together conversation
In spite of due to
Her passport and something about her skin
For a moment though
She only exists in one time and one space
Among the fat earthworms
In the hollow of a dirt-caked palm
On the back playground
Beneath some Mountain ash and forsythia
on the inside of the cinderblock wall
Before the drunk college students trip past shouting
or the stadium music and light show begins at ten
Outside Near the pagoda
Despite the humidity
Since she's here
Since she's been here Almost since her beginning
Under the sky Following the gate's ridge
which she climbed over the night before
to meet up with friends in the alley
Since it's hot and the height of monsoon season Since she's wearing overalls
and her hair's tied up with a dalgi bandana
Since for today the sky's kind of blue and gritty
Since today the trees are shapely as arms
Beyond tomorrow's neck sweat
Or the tour for the new kids
In case she's ever going to leave
After she remembers
Underneath Due to her sadness
Some blossoms
After gathering the willow branches in her hand
her body swings out over
the field's gravel,
a body becoming
an ellipsis