Hold This End
by Jeniffer Yoo, South Korea. Third place in the Writory International Poetry Contest, September 2026, scored 94 out of 100.
Jeniffer Yoo "Hold This End" I. Six Legs, Four Days He measured the room before he measured wood. Walked its length twice, said nothing, walked it again. Some fathers buy a desk already whole. Mine bought planks and told me: hold the tape. Four days he knelt Into that floor, a level’s one green eye rolling, and rolling, until it lay flat as a held breath. I was fifteen, grown already past what the old desk knew. He didn’t say this is for who you’ll become. He said hold this end. Don’t let it drop. By the fourth night the wood ran the wall’s full length, longer than any child requires, built, I see now, for someone who wasn’t yet born into it, the way a man leaves a door unlocked for someone not yet home. II. The Bicycle He Never Grew Into He told me this once, only because I asked what the desk had meant to him, whether someone, once, had built him this kind of room. There was no desk. There was a bicycle, frame too long for his legs, a seat he could not reach flat-footed. Rather than wait the two years it would take to fit him, he got on wrong-sized, wobbled the alley’s length, fell twice, and on the third pass, stayed knees splayed, laughing at something none of us were there to hear. Not a lesson. A weight set down at last, one he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it was there. A line of fathers, I think, each teaching the next to let go a little sooner than they had been let, how far back it runs, even he didn’t know. He had been forty years learning to ride what was too big for him, and had been quietly handing me the bicycle ever since: this desk, this door, this leaving he let happen without once reaching out to steady the seat, without once calling me home. III. Won and Won and Won His own father told him two things that should have cancelled out and never did: save what you can, even a hundred won, a thousand, ten thousand, small coins pressed edge to edge like teeth in a jar, and if it gets to be too much, you can always come home. Be responsible for yourself. You are not, however, alone. I have turned that coin over for years the way you turn a stone looking for the dry side. It never resolves. It was never meant to. Two hands on the same rope, holding from opposite ends, not pulling. Just keeping it taut enough to climb, should I ever need to come home. IV. What They Bring I live two hours from the house that built me, in a room I keep myself now, laundry folded by my own uneven hands, a kitchen I’m still learning the grammar of. And still, some Saturdays, my mother and grandmother arrive with banchan stacked and sealed, as if it might spill its whole meaning if the lid slipped loose in the trunk. They find the corners I forgot to clean. leave a parka in winter, a cooling pad in summer, love arriving in the shape of weather before I’ve thought to fear it, pulling me back, some Saturdays two hours toward home. V. What He Built the Surface For He built the desk longer than I needed so I’d have to decide, myself, where the working ends and the living starts, no shelf to tell me, no groove already cut. Just wood, and the slow arithmetic of getting it wrong for years, until it was my own. He isn’t in the room when I sit down to it now. He never meant to be. That was the quiet architecture of the whole thing: he built the surface level So that whatever I stacked on it after: books, failure, coffee rings, a second desk in another house, this poem, this life two hours from his hands, would have something true to stand on. Some men build a house and call it love. Mine built a straight line and a way out, checked it twice, and let me walk it home.
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