Emptying the truck 
was Seung-Pyo’s first job in America: 

passing cardboard boxes 
through gradations of night 

letting them fall upon the belt 
with the arrhythmia of raindrops. 

The stopwatch throbs 
like a headache 

worsened by the fluorescent bulbs 
which glare like no natural thing.  

The rain doesn’t let up. 
Routing the bruised packages  

was his second job. One per second: 
no romantic metaphors 

here. Enveloped by artificial dark 
sealed with artificial light 

his legs and chest remember the bright snow 
he was made to stand in waist deep 

by his superior officers. How he began  
to feel warm again as he numbed, 

how this was the first stage of death.  
How this is the way he feels in Erin Brown’s 

arms between shift and school, 
and the way he will feel telling his son 

this story like a love story,  
a broken myth.