Boxing Pandora

You keep my dreams in that pocket-sized room,
just large enough to fit a bed, a desk, and a child’s
body. Ever since numbers became more than fingers
and apples, I’ve held the beating sun against the glass
window. The world as I know it is between my thumb
and index. The hours unfold on the spoiled wood
of the desk, where I have etched my middle name
and the year when I reach the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
My math teacher tells us to travel the world, in the small
globe I see through the screen. The destination is set
anywhere but here. In my afternoon dreams, sand pearls
web my toes closer to the body in the distance, the fat
of the whale, glistening among the hard leather
of the beach. I picture the brittle earth between leaves,
waking the callus maturing on the soles of my feet.
This window had taught time and her silhouette
as a thicket of clouds knitted to the blue, that holy,
reckless child I could never catch. At times the sky
bruises with the screams of our brothers and sisters,
seeping through window seals and gnawing at the strings
that thread my room. My mother comes in with sliced
apples and promises me of life, flesh and sense bathed
in the sand, unspoiled.

By Seungbihn Park

Seungbihn Park is a 17-year-old Korean student who is currently attending Cheongna Dalton School in South Korea. She was born in Switzerland and lived in several different countries, including the U.S., the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic. Her poems have been awarded by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and published by Trouvaille Review, Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and the WEIGHT journal.