Ergene Kim
When the Clocks Stop Ticking
I was never taught what to do
When the clocks stop ticking.
Do I hide among the
trashed magazines? The
ones shoved under the Man’s
Buried doormat, the ones unseen,
The ones deemed unworthy.
Do I hide among the pages
of my books? When the clock
stopped ticking at 1984, Orwell
said to me—
I told you so,
I told you all.
and I beg for forgiveness from
the shelter of my library.
Or must I crawl into the hidden spaces,
the ones written between the laws of
our Land the ones that tell me and others
and us that separate is equal that
glass ceilings are invisible that no other
people came before the ones that live here
now that no one else may come it’s
Forbidden Restricted Immoral Illegal that
we are the people but not everyone
is Human.
Ergene Kim’s poems have been published in the New Jersey Live Poets Society and the Plum Tree Tavern. She is a high school student in San Ramon, California.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.