resident god of your local train station attempts to define immortality in technical terms

by Yoonseo Lee, Fiona Jin, and Sharyn Phu

the trains you are trying to catch are barreling toward you—

i, god of all homecomings & home to none: they always ask me where i’m going

in a station rotting with reachable ends, as if i—plural, uncountable—am not the heartbeat,

the wail of everything living like a warning siren thrumming underneath sand city & razed concrete

—i gorge on evidence of entropy: tanghulu sugar slathered on a burnt solo cup

whiskers from the grand rat 1/32nd of someone’s favorite street jianbing

abandoned high-rise the tracks promising their philosophy of distance but

today cleaves me into steel expanse worn tiles wish good morning and good night like how

TV mothers cry 今年回家吧 at the screen— prettily, penitently, scratched lottery tickets in hand,

& keep searching for the annual stillness, we set off our firecrackers, lay fruit on the shrines.

still, fists gripping letters never sent, my best friend says everyone wants to kill—something.

echoes of forgotten rituals released, returning, i avoid

your prayers speaking everything alive

—i put on a human form, slip out the rails tangential to reverence

& i do not tell you what i’ve let die.

i pay my regards to 이촌동 bus stop, i stop by my childhood: green paths, buzzing cicadas

consider the magpie, the school children follow me into 꿈나무 어린이공원 playground, swings rustle

my order of tteokbokki—i think it is too sweet, the water fountain cleanses the excess away,

araki nobuyoshi’s book left on the bench asks are lines and persons only real once seen?

—no, do not glance back at the decay: we’re like family here, until the old teapot gives out, &

tea leaves bite into rust; every passenger has silently agreed upon

silence dragged from memory, this dream that silhouettes a non-place you never told me;

another 新年 passes. i will continue believing in what doesn’t exist.

you, fading little by little until by the time you arrive, you’ve almost evaporated.