Added overnight is another horizon twenty degrees off the original. Skydivers are spotted a few imaginary feet above the ground after landing Migrating birds drift between lines, flapping slantwise. Night after night more horizons slit into view, crowd out the notion of horizon. Had this happened centuries ago, Columbus and Galilei would have pondered differently, put our moments of sanity at the risk of reinvention. The line of sight, tilted, makes everyone sleep at the angle of a lopsided horizon. It begins to take longer for a day to begin to begin. Every sun lingers baffled across the gloaming fissures, like an invertebrate animal, each leg thrashing in the wake of thoughts of its own. Clocks obsolete, skies cracked mirrors about to collapse, greetings go warmer: stay inside your slanting mind. With more than one horizon to pursue, no one wants to stay home with her cats. A waterfront view is panoramic chaos, windows displaying water meeting sky at all spokes of the horizons, like splices of DNA. The Earth now must be a new species, they say, the Earth now must be a father! The East think they foresaw this, having called the sky man and the earth woman for centuries, with their idea of yin and yang, but cannot figure out if this is due to too many women or too few. The West—well, they can’t locate themselves, the world off-kilter like this. Which way now is westward, they ask, how to redefine the notion of direction. Hollywood alone loves numerous sunsets to disappear into, all endings turned open-ended, while religions fight over which horizon is real, and nations over how to divide the sky and water again. Meanwhile retirees most lament the loss of their favorite restaurants owned by doomsday believers. Children dream of Hippasus drowning in the aftermath of surd and Franz Ferdinand blood-jammed in his tight suit, and wake up into the world’s bizarre sequence of events, buzzing with the question: what happens next?
Suphil Lee Park is a bilingual writer who was born and grew up in South Korea. She received a BA in English from NYU and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Global Poetry Anthology, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and the Massachusetts Review, among many others. Her fiction is forthcoming in J Journal, Storm Cellar, and the Iowa Review.