The Line, the Stem, the Thread

All morning she wonders what to say in a line as
long as her palm. She puts her hand

on a sheet of paper with her crooked fingertips stretched
wide like little veins of butterfly wings. She holds a pen

in her other hand then marks
the beginning and the end. It had already started to rain.

She makes a cup of coffee and starts to draw the line
connecting the little black dot that marked the thumb

to the other dot that marked the pinky, and
as her pen glides across the white,

she observes the part of the line in which the ink smears
thicker, and the part in which there is no pulse, and

the part in which, right before it stopped beating,
the heart jumped wildly.

She knows a line she would write
is a stem, trembling, with no resilient petals

to bounce off the heavy raindrops,
just a weak solo,

a long thread that holds words
that are overweight.

Poem (for a snow goose)

Let’s talk about a wedding ring, a promise
Ring, a finger collar, a token of knot well-tied, a conclusion
To an engagement, an evolution, an epiphany.

What seems fit is not what is meant to be–
Sometimes the cleanest water is not to be swallowed
By the worthiest woman of all the land on Earth.

Say a snow goose swallows the wedding ring
Of a bride under the bushes of wisteria outside a chapel
As unprepared as all the mothers
Who face their children drowning in the sea.

She is yet to grieve. She just doesn’t know what it means
To have her ring, her future, swallowed by a goose
On her wedding day. She thinks
Is the ring not meant for me?
Is he not meant to be with me?
What is in fact an oracle? A coincidence?

I feel compassion for the manifestation of doubt
On something that is lost or taken.
To a mother who lost her child to the ocean,
One can say that God had other plans for the boy, but it’s hearsay.

Yet, what happens is not what is meant to be–
This is not a poem but an empty spot on a woman’s finger,
Her melancholy as she reminisces

What could have been hers
Now belongs inside the stomach of a snow goose
standing under the bushes of wisteria outside the chapel.

Cistus

What is it when I think about love
it’s an image of you in your dark jeans,
standing outside the coffee joint, waiting
for my shift to end like a true gardener,
nurturing, watering, waiting, and repeating
the same ritual every day so gracefully as if
it proves a certain theory, and I finally come out
shoving my apron under the counter, dabbing
on lipg loss, jumping into your arms
warm and patient, hoping maybe this is the day
I sleep at your apartment, although I don’t want to
interrupt your slow and gentle rhythm, give in
to the desire to ignore what the sex at this particular
moment would do to the relationship, just peel off your shirt
from your white plaster shoulders, touch the muscle
of your flat tummy, down to the metal of the belt
cold like the beak of an owl softly hooting through
the night, but instead, you grab my hand and
walk into an empty parking lot, hold my head
against your heart pounding and pounding, and stroke
my hair like the gardener you are, as if I were
a single flower that was secretly dying
then I realize this is the moment I wouldn’t trade
for anything else that could have happened tonight,
the moment I would carve into my vague sense of need.

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Kieren Jeane was born in Seoul, Korea in 2001. She is a Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. Jeane’s work has been shown in various galleries in the US, including Prince Street Gallery in New York City, Project Gallery V in Brooklyn, and Gallery Aferro in New Jersey. Her paintings have also been published twice in Art Maze Magazine based in London. Her poems have been published by multiple literary journals, including Asterism of Ohio State University, Coelacanth of Newman University, Collision of University of Pittsburg, and Equinox of University of Arkansas. Kieren Jeane currently lives and works in Baltimore.