Airing

​Onerous as curtains
Tainted with their piss, little
Cats pace by wall-length windows,
Sonorous
In the echo. Their
Eyes under
The cascading smelly
Velvet, bobbing,
Pinned with needleleaf slits
That might belong
On pythons
Whose spines are as long
As the folds and shadows of drapes.

Behind the reptilians,
The stained glass is a forest.

Has it been centuries?
The crystal woods are only as deep
As I am willing to look in.
The leaves are triangles,
A shepherd holds one.
Under him, outside the glass,
The cats lick, tongues
Comet red.

Holding fire between lips
Is too much. They lisp, eyes lasering,
Slits widening, the golden horns
Of a big band
Ready to blow. Round the corners of the glass,
Rise and rise.
The cats slither up
The rising curtains and fall.
The window opens.
I smell pine.

Back to: Issue Ten

Next: Sarah Fatima Mohammed

Jack Jung studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. His poetry and translations have been published in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, Chicago Review, Guernica Magazine, The Margins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College.