"Out of Seoul" by Marte Carlock-Clifford

Out of Seoul

Below us plumgray cloud seas
   exhale dragon breath
on dragon wings we rise
to meet the night
   gobbling up a time zone every hour
 
the polestar rises with us
   its wheel of constellations arrayed
   in a plan I cannot see at home
 
To cross such seas
   Magellan labored four hundred days
 we will arrive in theory
                        before we left.

Marte Carlock-CLIFFORD

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marte Carlock-Clifford finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in forty-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s the author of “A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston”; she sometimes writes for sculpture and landscape architecture magazines and the Internet Review of Books. She recently published a poetry collection, How It Will Be from Now on Out.

Headshot: Marte Carlock-Clifford

Photo Credit: Staff