14 Jul Orientation by Cindy Juyoung Ok
than the pictures, I report
to a friend who, after nine
years in prison, is still
shocked that when we were ten
I had not seen a cow.
When he asks me,
tenant of the language
in which I meet him, what
the outside is like, I offer
reluctant lines: the birds
sound more and more
like car alarms, and some have
begged for one that runs in
a minor key, but
quiet is so expensive
in this calendar, which runs
on a logic of paradise,
i.e., of grief. Attitudes
toward bells are proportional
to proximity, as public music
relies on the worship
of intimacy, and a belief
in the work: to foil
regret, to regard cement
as liquid, to fade eventually
well. In love, the teenagers’
eyes widen and their
grammar shrinks. Form outlives
us, but barely.
About the Poet
Cindy Juyoung Ok is a writer, an editor, and an educator. She was a physics teacher at a public high school before teaching creative writing at the university level.
Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, her poems have been published in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ok was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022-2023. She is also the translator of South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s The Hell of That Star which will be published in 2026 by Wesleyan University Press.
This poem appears in Ward Toward (2024) published by Yale University Press.
Photo credit: Kari Orvik
Related Event
-
- Cindy Juyoung Ok will join poet Michael McGriff, along with a musical performance by the Austin, Texas-based regret pop band Sun June, and a visual art projection installation by award-winning Buffalo-based writer and visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger at the next Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 27 at Silo City (Marine A), 85 Silo City Row in Buffalo. Doors at 7:00 p.m. Reading begins at 7:30 p.m. Books of the featured poets are available for purchase from Fitz Books online and at the event.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.