While the first yellow leaves
stare from their unforgetting,
and summer starts to become nothing
more than a hallucination, I myself
start to unforget. Familiar strangers start to recur
on the walls, and it’s funny—
because I’ve been making new strangers
wherever I go. Like the sentimentalist I
am, I cry over these strangers. I cry
over their dead friends and
brothers and sister, because everybody’s got dead people,
and it tastes bitter: like when you keep toothpaste
on the inside of your cheek for too long. And
now what? Faces swarm like deadly hornets
into haunted smears of color, painting an ugly portrait of what could easily be
a grotesque image of a monster that only exists in my world
and my world only. Blue and purple limbs and delicate,
stitched skin around the eyes dotted with makeup, while
twisted in all the wrong angles, like some thing
drawn by Picasso.
I’ve never really liked Picasso.
About the Author
Yoon Park is a dynamic high school student enrolled at Seoul Academy in Seoul, South Korea. She channels her creative energy into writing and visual art and finds joy in expressing herself through these mediums. Additionally, she has a passion for music and spends her spare time playing the piano. Her dedication to her craft has earned her recognition and admission into the prestigious Sewanee Young Writers Conference.
