Monica Youn
Monica Youn was born in 1971 in Berkeley, California, and was raised in Houston, Texas. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, her Master’s degree from Oxford University, a law degree from Yale University, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. Her first book is Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003). She lives in New York City, where she is an entertainment lawyer.
Naglfar
she said they are building the ship
the color of steam the color of salt
the end of the world she stopped
speaking she was alone
she spent hours cutting her fingernails
they won’t take them when I die
she said for the ridged sides
of their ship cutting off
the white crescents they looked
like tiny boats they collected
in her pockets in the seams of her dress
I am trying she said
holding out her nailless hands
to prevent the end of the world
Ragnarok she said
if startled her eyes strayed
to the notched petals of the dogwoods
the flecks of mica in the path
Night Ferry to Naxos 1
All your carefully cultivated notions of realism
come to an end here, where the sentimental pink
funnels into the Peloponnese
like a rum and grenadine cocktail
poured down a taut throat. Tourist,
this is how the peace drains into you.
Your fingers uncurl on the deck railings,
and over your head, a spiraling umbilical
of ship-smoke loops back to the brown air of Athens,
which only now, behind you, is beginning
to take shape: a smog-shielded dome.
The flattering breeze picks out your contours
in silverpoint—its insinuations
sweet as fresh-laid sheets, a bedtime story,
mother love. Already above you,
half-heard, a tattoo of wingbeats, bare feet
racing in circles on hard-packed dirt.
You will have to become a hero like the rest of us.
Night Ferry to Naxos 2
Another round of Dona Nobis Pacem
from the Italian ladies below deck and you know
you’ll never be rid of it now.
You’re still humming sotto voce at 3 A.M.
When the hold’s thick wall falls away
to reveal this island, coy as a cameo
on a widow’s black bosom.
Since April, a honeyed
habit-forming dew
has been collecting
in the hollows of the rocks,
and the local myths, freshly washed,
have been polishing their bare limbs.
All for you, wind-whipped
and shivering on the gangplank: the deus
ex machina in silver lamé,
a lobster on an enormous plate, a birth….
Nothing you can do will disappoint them now.
Flatlanders
Here the sky’s all spreading belly,
postcoital, pressing the ground
deeper into the ground.
Rumors of incest: a folded
Rorschach, a mirror in love with a lake.
In fenced backyards across Fort Bend County
buttered-up high-school sweethearts
lie on sheets of tinfoil for a tan;
wake up crying, siren-red,
eyelids swollen into temporary lips.
*
We know no other shapes
than those that contain us;
we have built our zoneless city,
hub of freeways, a dark ètoile.
In Tony’s, an ageless lady stirs
her iced tea till the ice cubes melt
to sharp-boned shadows of themselves;
a wink of lime slice, her gem-knuckled hand.
In the garage of St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital,
shivering, an intern in short-sleeved scrubs
pulls a soft gold spot into the center
of his cigarette filter, an indrawn breath.
*
Hurricane season in the suburbs:
windows asterisked
with masking tape—crosshairs,
false-eyelashed eyes. We remember
when the whole city was a pavé brooch
most of us would covet.
Sometimes we feel lucky:
the hurricane’s eye—
our shy neighbors emerge
into the ultramarine
spotlight, the settling leaves,
stand hushed, reverent,
peering up the skirts of the storm.
*
In the eighth grade we learned
a cone pushed through a plane
is a spreading circle to the Flatlanders.
There’s no point in looking up.
From time to time a football drops
from the technicolor buzz of stadium lights
into the supplicant hands
of some misshapen archetypal hero.
And on the last night of every year,
the sullen boot-clad men of Pasadena
park on the feeder roads, sit for hours
on the roofs of their pickups,
trying to shoot the fireworks out of the sky.