Florist
for Stephen
I’ve been looking for my head. Turns out, I left it
at your house in that village we lived in once. I must have,
because of the cold winter night—I refused to freeze
my head off.
You grabbed me by my forearm and led me back
to your home, where my head was kept warm
with food and music. I left it there instead of returning it to my body,
which is too healthy for its own good,
and opened my throat like a peeled fruit to the elements.
I know my head is still there:
the flowers growing out of its mouth, each with its own taste—
those flowers that only bloom in that village.
It must mean spring has finally come.
I taste myself.
Astrologist
for Soje
There were nights when I did not fall asleep,
my mind racing through paper-smelling corridors
of Demon Slayer’s last chapters that I had read before
going to bed, desperate to find your room, though
the rooms in that unending fortress were filled with gods
and monsters, their lips bloody, and no trace of you.
Every room that could’ve been yours renovated
to welcome new tenants who didn’t arrive.
Exhausted, I dreamt that I grew old in that fortress
as it crumbled like a sculpture of sand
until I woke up and found myself in a city by the ocean.
You and I were already walking in a crowd
toward where we should go, you said. We talked
about an old tale of monsters and gods,
and your hair was the color of a morning sky
that relieves the night from holding all its constellations,
planets telling the oldest stories again and again
as you navigated the city’s oldest streets.
When I wanted to fall on my knees and weep beneath
the unending skyscrapers murdering the sky,
you told me about the stars resting under the morning
sky of your hair, how they were in the shape
of monsters and gods.
You didn’t have to stay awake to see your stars.
From the Author: These poems, “Florist” and “Astrologist,” explore the intimate spaces between personal loss and the comfort found in memory, nostalgia, and relationships. I wrote them to honor two friends who live very differently from me, yet still welcomed me into their homes and gifted me their friendship.
Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow currently working on the translation of Kim Hyesoon’s hybrid collection Thus Spoke Lady No, to be published by Ecco in 2026. He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is the co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), which won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2020. His first poetry collection will be published by Black Square Editions in the summer of 2025. He teaches at Davidson College.