By: Haeun (Regina) Kim

This Holy Litany (Salem Witch Trials)

after Allen Ginsberg

A psalm, a hymn, and a prayer. A
palm holding a candle. Confess. Reap.

Stained glass rings like sanctuary
bells. Fire crucifies us all. Witch. You

sow what you reap. Write this holy
litany like sacrament. Covenant. We are

culprits at pulpit. Confess. Drink from
the chalice. Seedy grapes, like rosary

beads. They root in your lungs. Does this
make you a place of worship? This is a

worship poem. Repent. Kneel. A psalm, a
hymn, and a prayer. Fire baptizes us all.

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?

Spin the carousel. Orbit
and drift, like a blinking lantern.
Chandelier wobbles. Volcano
bubbles like a skeleton cocoon.
Splash, spin. Prism shimmers.
Cathedral crumbles. Honeycomb
crawls up tower like a crimson
crown or velvet moss. Comet
tumbles. Mirrored scarecrow.
Eclipse.

The Man in the Clock

pushes the hands into place, their fingers interlocking
like a slow dance. We must imagine Sisyphus
dancing. Stepping in tempo to a rhythm he can not
understand. Must
he understand? The man in the clock stands
and dips his partner, and
the bell tolls.

From below, the clock is a monochromatic smear
of Roman numerals and white space,
like suits and ties at a funeral. Time flies. It really
does. The clock is an angled band like a
knocker at death’s door. Time flies. It flies like
the Earth curves, so slow and gradual that
no one notices, not even the
man in the clock.

From above, do they even see
the clock? Do they hold it in their hands,
swing it like a watch? Are clocks watches?
Are watches clocks? Do they watch
us? Clocks are a currency they don’t recognize.
Instead, they study our scurrying
backs as we hurry
to spend, waste, and earn
time. Live by the clock
like a slave does. Like a dancer does.

In the dark, the dim light of the streetlamp
washes over the clock. Bathes it, scrubs it clean,
swallows it. We could twist its hands off
and it would still tick. Like a bomb. Like
Sisyphus’s metronome. Tick, tick, tick.
Check marks on bucket lists we never make.
Crossed out names that the light
swallows.

Sometimes, the man speaks,
voice muffled within the waxen
surface of the clock. Wax drips from
candles as they burn. The brightest
burns the fastest. How do we live when
breathing is a breed
of death? How do we live with ourselves?
The man does not answer,
or maybe we were not meant to hear.

We remember this clock, with the man
trapped inside like an exotic, endangered animal.
And if we squint our eyes,
so the clock blurs into the horizon
and we see, for a striking moment,
the curve of the Earth—we remember
that we are the man in the clock.
We must imagine ourselves dancing.

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Haeun (Regina) Kim is a student writer from Seoul, South Korea. An alumna of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, and the Sunhouse Summer Writing Mentorship, she has been recognized by Bennington College, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, River of Words, and more. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Stone Soup, and The Galway Review, among others. An editor at Polyphony Lit, she serves as the founder of MISO-JIEUM. When not writing, she can be found painting in an art studio or struggling through amateur ballet.