Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

The Universe Is All About Pranks

 

And this is how you have come to be here, on a hoagie wild hare

but this is New York City––Murray Hill no less where hoagie sightings

have been debunked as the stuff of urban myth. Do you think you should trust

anyone who tells you, “Just go down one more block to First Avenue

and make a left”? Clearly, this is a test of how good you are at reading signs

because the Universe is all about pranks.

 

You must get used to the fact that the Universe has no

investment in you making it through mid-afternoon Midtown

Manhattan. The Universe has no care for your human condition

of fearing death, nor your compulsion to search for that damned fountain

of youth. It does not feel sorry for your loop of death-thinking: we dissolve

into dirt, we become atoms floating into the sky.

 

Yes, you want the story about the Russian guy surviving 21 days in a cave

by licking water running down its walls to be enough to garner a flicker

of acknowledgment on the impressive will of our species

but what difference to a Universe that thinks a hoagie is the same thing

as a hero?

---

Jiwon Choi is the author One Daughter Is Worth Ten Sons and I Used To Be Korean, both published by Hanging Loose Press. She is an early childhood educator at the Educational Alliance where she works with children and teachers on developing emergent curriculum. She is a longtime gardener and coordinator at the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Garden, where she started her garden’s first poetry reading series, Poets Read in the Garden, to support local poets with live reading events in a lushly green outdoor space. You can find out more about her at iusedtobekorean.com.

 

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx