Interlaken

 

 
 
 
Get a running start.  Catch

a good wind, he said: Be a good   

 

bird. I thought him German

as his hand did the wave––tumult

 

of syllables, the ocean. A gust carried us

from the top of a ridge to where land

 

helixes hug vague bodies

of water, pebbled pastures

 

skimming treelines across the range

littered with wildflowers. Winds lilted:

 

It’s not your day to go, as I watched

clouds blush vermillion, flying

 

in tandem as a crow does over

reservoirs and glacial gorges. That high

 

up, I thought maybe we could fall

in love, full of pomp and spectacle,

 

but he was a stranger, and to him, I was

strange; possibly ugly. Everyone

 

peddles timing––the random alchemy

of abutting molecules––though

 

I’ve grown weary of waiting. Stillness

is the danger. So I spread out

 

my arms, carved ciphers into ether

while a choir could be heard along

 

the nave where winding trails scissor

the basin. Spiraling downward,

 

I mouthed a new prayer, knelt in air

for deliverance, morphing into needle

 

of a compass, unbeholden to a place

inhospitable: the mind. The mind bent

 

on forgetting: I was blown wide open.

 
 
 

Su Hwang was recently awarded the 2016-17 Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant made possible by the Loft Literary Center and Jerome Foundation, juried by members of VONA. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she grew up in New York then moved to San Francisco before transplanting to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota, where she received her MFA in Poetry. She is also the recipient of the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship in Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. Several of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Drunken Boat, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, and Poets.org. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.