September 24, 2024

To Bear the Ruse

Cindy Juyoung Ok

Because I once chose death, I expend my days in
horror at the possibility of it
choosing me. There are comforts the living heave
onto the dying
to evince a defiant distance
from inevitability—that they were ready,
or there was reason—but don’t dare

say I went peacefully, willingly. Tell them
exhaustion took
over my will but that in my eyes
you saw no relief. That I pleaded to continue
and panicked in every trying terminal
breath. I have known intolerable pain but
at its end, I was alive, begging to begin again.

Make sure to explain that what I understood of
love was childishly intense and usually
disprovable. That I cried over a comma, confused
every skyline for another, did not believe any verse
could be blank. Don’t leave
out the walnut cracking on the gravel
that I mistook, one last time, for an acorn.

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“I wrote [this poem] last autumn while awaiting news about my brain condition, before the neuro ICU nights and hematoma seasons to come. Beyond wanting not to die, I did not want to die and narratively merit what I once chose, or to die and be claimed accepting of death (instead of faintly panicked around it as [my love for] life requires of me). Painful as it is, none of my loved ones died wanting death, [neither] agreeing peacefully it was time [n]or feeling they were prepared. Any platitude convenient for the living deserves questioning on behalf of the dying and dead.”
—Cindy Juyoung Ok

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024) and is the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). Ok is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

Ward Toward
(Yale University Press, 2024)

“Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden” by Eugenia Leigh
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“Tincture” by Andrea Gibson
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Thanks to Sawako Nakayasu, author of Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Nakayasu’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "To Bear the Ruse" by Cindy Juyoung Ok

To Bear the Ruse

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