Under dawn, we chant silent requiems.
Melodies tangent to dense immigrant rhetoric by which
rugged paper dolls leap. Our first birthdays
etched in symbols of hanbok
and american consumerism, line shelves of
jersey flats, windowless cement graves.
We move.
Elderly bows and teenage vernacular build
barring walls between continental homes and
as we age, the bricks harden.
So we tend to wilting plants on Brooklyn balcony gardens,
embracing matriarchal languages as soft buds wake.
We watch pink petal linings bloom gray
to the shroud fate of scattered linguistics interwoven.
I wish
Seoul would roll gently off my tongue.
The syntax of my mother’s psalms
carries the scent of sculpted branches, rippled with hefty
Persimmons. Her voice, a nostalgia-laden shanty
from Jeju’s coastal winds, remembered only by
boxed photographs and fickle oral histories.
She was too young to produce decipherable translations
of her memories. Only how they felt. Grass
and kimchi and American TV.
Now those visuals feel different
and manifest in Gowanus basements overrun by her
sculpted monuments, caricatures of torn bodies
rerouted. She finds screams— of TSA stripping her of our forgiveness
and stained remembrance of Gangnam’s abusive grace — in every
reverberation of her arts. I wonder:
What does it feel like to run across water?
In all our landless grief and Easter texts,
we lose our faith in a God who damns us otherwise. One
who confines children into rigid borders
embellishing the confused with nationalistic pride.
Yet, our heterogeneous lives are flooded
like weeds along industrial Busan skylines on
which bare memories lie.
And we pray, by ruptured stained glass windows,
for fathers who blame their children for aging, for battles fought
on foreign soil on which we did not breed. We hear brittle
hypocrisy in books of Locke and Washington,
documents of promise—forged truth and American
dreams—shattered statements of western progress east on
obstructed Bushwick streets, and rooftops above nightlights.
I try not to look at my mother, whose eyes cement onto
me—glimpse through a reflection to watch my mother’s altar.