Jeffrey Park- Two Poems

THE SPLINTER

The splinter, do you remember

the little sliver

of something you had in your foot, so

small that you

couldn’t even see it

and I had to dig it out with my penknife

while you squirmed

and I dug and you moaned and gritted

your teeth

and I just kept digging because otherwise it

would get funky

and marinated in puss but in the end I

got it out and then I kissed

the hurt away?

I’ll let you in on

a little secret I’ve been keeping.

There was no splinter.

But later I did find a tiny thorn outside

and put it in

a little jar that I keep on my nightstand

and I often gaze at it

and think of you.

VEG

Eat your damn vegetables, my pop used to yell at me

like it was some kind of fierce wisdom, damn

vegetables, scrape them off the plate, bite them, chew them,

swallow them all, eat them up now.

And what would they do for me anyway– make me

grow up into a clean-living man?

Build moral fibers?

Keep my teeth from falling out, my bones

from splintering, my snot from turning all runny.

Then again: could there be more?

Maybe veggies well digested would surrender up insights

into the secret lives

of growing things, trees and weeds

and stinging nettles, hanging vines, sad backyard shrubs.

At its greenly pulsing heart

every celery stalk could be a primeval redwood, every turnip

a forest denizen from the misty dawn of time.

To digest them would be to know them all.

On the other hand: eat

your damn dessert, my dad also used to command. Lick out

that bowl, I’m watching you.

Eat your damn napkin, you little termite, eat the table,

eat the walls.

Leave the veggies on your plate, I tell

my kiddies, leave them lie as if they were poison. Go on

outside and put them back in the ground. Set them free.

Who knows, maybe

they’ll be able to do you a good turn someday, too.


Bio: Jeffrey Park is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. He currently lives in Munich, Germany where he works at a private secondary school, as well as teaching business English to adults. His most recent poems have appeared in Subliminal Interiors, Danse Macabre, Punk Soul Poet, Mobius, Darkling Magazine and elsewhere.