POETRY
Yejin Suh, Jeffrey Liao, Michelle Hsia, Ana Chen, Anonymous
Yejin Suh, Jeffrey Liao, Michelle Hsia, Ana Chen, Anonymous
Yeoboseyo
Yejin Suh
A man I didn’t know once said to me: Yeoboseyo, which means, Hello?
Are you there? It means the silence across a phone, it means
inverted closeness. Yeoboseyo, Are you impressed
I know words in your language? He said, What are you?
What are you?
I. TO HARBINGERS OF A SLANTED HATE.
A single word can topple worlds, you know. I said yeah,
I’m impressed. I didn’t want to contribute to the demolition
of a society, to kudzu vines asphyxiating the local Sears,
roadkill venison strung up billboards to rinse my palms
crimson. And an ocean retreated. I was going to be sick of this
talk my tides roiling my words razed by your filthy lips, the
pinnacle of my existence pinned in your crosshairs of cultural
disparity. Don’t speak yeoboseyo, don’t ask me what I am, we
just met and we’re not friends. Am I being rude? Am I being rude
or am I imagining your gut blowing sea spray across your simpering
sails, across your potbelly thrust forward, a faithful heathen,
between cross-hatchings of the speckles at your unshaven face your
dirty face your dirty lips don’t speak yeoboseyo. It means, Hello?
Are you there? I am not here, not for you nor me, nor the thousand
voices writhing up my throat, my ancestors haunting the tilt
of my brow, a glacial slope. To gift you my name one too many times
for you to listen with anything but the deliberate recklessness of one who
chooses to still forget. You refuse to master the delicacy of an empire
with your clumsy tongue. Kingdoms capsize at your carelessness. I’m
a foreigner and you’re loud like a foreigner. Ask me menial questions
like yeoboseyo? Illusory intimacy with a universe you have
never galloped drives our distance farthest.
II. TO BANDITS WHO NESTLE BETWEEN MY MONOLIDS.
Wear your dreads. Your bindi. Your Native headdress. Call yourself
a ‘koreaboo’: you like ‘k-pop,’ ‘k-dramas’, ‘k-beauty’, the epitome
of entire cultures boiled and compressed to these neat quadrangled packages
to take home like pre-packed lunch boxes, except you always zip them open
and toss out folded eyes, ill-lit hair, shadowed skins. You clear out
every shop in town, picking and choosing. We’re always left sifting
through the discards to wonder why some things are trashed
but others aren’t. We’re waiting quietly in line until our races are
in fashion again (blacks, browns heading the queue). Make me
titter at department store windows, loitering for a glimpse of the latest
display: I want to see a second skin hung up, staring back at me
with tilted eyes. We’re k-trending right now. Clever, eclectic thief.
III. TO AN ECHO OF A LANGUAGE IN STILL WATER.
There is a language of two arms dancing in tandem. There is a language
of our mouths parting in frostbitten rings, concentric circles rippling
peace. There is a language of peace and a language of romance. You can
speak neither or both and a language is only understandable to some, else
the world might hear. There is a language of the sweat off our backs
dripping in trails, entrails of insides strewn across floors, because we speak
in the pain. There is a language for me, not really for you, a language I listen to
when it speaks back to me. For you’ve never straddled the cosmic belt
between a language to speak and one to hear, a language through which
I’ve lost centuries. My mother says she pities me in the motherland
because they wouldn’t take me as their own: I belong not to the mother tongue
but to the spangled banners. There is a language noisy sounding, brawling,
reminiscent of German that is the language I have learned like a roughened
lover. I’ve brushed with my thumbs where his hips slope to thigh, and the
nook between jaw and collar. He slammed my head against the wall
and embraced me in a lock and key I knew I might never fit again (The
Germans have a word dasein for the paradox of being like my mere
state a pull between two hands that stretch). She says they wouldn’t
take me as their own and neither would the Americans. The children of
immigrants rise a new tsunami and these children know the feeling of
swallowing a tide of shame at their mothers’ broken English. These
children know to act the reluctant mediator, because when a mother
speaks broken English and the child knows it like a lover the mother
becomes fragments and child becomes same, like switching
bodies except both are devoid of crucial parts like vessels without
blood and brain. These children want to hear the pin-drop
in a cave that roars stillness to hear the echo of an echo. To look
around, unmoving, in a city swarm, to seize a semblance of knowing, to
say I belong here, with you, with you all, not anywhere else, here,
where any link that snaps homogeneity is an outsider, and I am not. To say,
I belong here, is a travesty. To the shade of your skin or the slant of my
eyes. I wonder what it would be like to write a poem such as this, a long
and lengthy poem, of curious words and stacked phrases, a poem of worlds
and small rivers, to show it to my mother to know she can understand every word
and nothing less. I wouldn’t know. Not in this lifetime. Maybe in another,
we’ll dismantle the walls that encircle us. There is a language of demolition, too.
IV. TO A ZEPHYR WHO WHISTLES FAINTER ON THE YELLOW SEA.
Eyes, Junoesque stars tittering, like she knew I was one of them--
I was one of them--
I am one of them--
Of the galaxies that pervade us, not us, just me—To look inside out intimately and suddenly--
Once again strangers in a city—words crisped to nothings on my teeth--
I marveled myself, a wind borne of two nations, blowing eternal in neither.
Yejin Suh
A man I didn’t know once said to me: Yeoboseyo, which means, Hello?
Are you there? It means the silence across a phone, it means
inverted closeness. Yeoboseyo, Are you impressed
I know words in your language? He said, What are you?
What are you?
I. TO HARBINGERS OF A SLANTED HATE.
A single word can topple worlds, you know. I said yeah,
I’m impressed. I didn’t want to contribute to the demolition
of a society, to kudzu vines asphyxiating the local Sears,
roadkill venison strung up billboards to rinse my palms
crimson. And an ocean retreated. I was going to be sick of this
talk my tides roiling my words razed by your filthy lips, the
pinnacle of my existence pinned in your crosshairs of cultural
disparity. Don’t speak yeoboseyo, don’t ask me what I am, we
just met and we’re not friends. Am I being rude? Am I being rude
or am I imagining your gut blowing sea spray across your simpering
sails, across your potbelly thrust forward, a faithful heathen,
between cross-hatchings of the speckles at your unshaven face your
dirty face your dirty lips don’t speak yeoboseyo. It means, Hello?
Are you there? I am not here, not for you nor me, nor the thousand
voices writhing up my throat, my ancestors haunting the tilt
of my brow, a glacial slope. To gift you my name one too many times
for you to listen with anything but the deliberate recklessness of one who
chooses to still forget. You refuse to master the delicacy of an empire
with your clumsy tongue. Kingdoms capsize at your carelessness. I’m
a foreigner and you’re loud like a foreigner. Ask me menial questions
like yeoboseyo? Illusory intimacy with a universe you have
never galloped drives our distance farthest.
II. TO BANDITS WHO NESTLE BETWEEN MY MONOLIDS.
Wear your dreads. Your bindi. Your Native headdress. Call yourself
a ‘koreaboo’: you like ‘k-pop,’ ‘k-dramas’, ‘k-beauty’, the epitome
of entire cultures boiled and compressed to these neat quadrangled packages
to take home like pre-packed lunch boxes, except you always zip them open
and toss out folded eyes, ill-lit hair, shadowed skins. You clear out
every shop in town, picking and choosing. We’re always left sifting
through the discards to wonder why some things are trashed
but others aren’t. We’re waiting quietly in line until our races are
in fashion again (blacks, browns heading the queue). Make me
titter at department store windows, loitering for a glimpse of the latest
display: I want to see a second skin hung up, staring back at me
with tilted eyes. We’re k-trending right now. Clever, eclectic thief.
III. TO AN ECHO OF A LANGUAGE IN STILL WATER.
There is a language of two arms dancing in tandem. There is a language
of our mouths parting in frostbitten rings, concentric circles rippling
peace. There is a language of peace and a language of romance. You can
speak neither or both and a language is only understandable to some, else
the world might hear. There is a language of the sweat off our backs
dripping in trails, entrails of insides strewn across floors, because we speak
in the pain. There is a language for me, not really for you, a language I listen to
when it speaks back to me. For you’ve never straddled the cosmic belt
between a language to speak and one to hear, a language through which
I’ve lost centuries. My mother says she pities me in the motherland
because they wouldn’t take me as their own: I belong not to the mother tongue
but to the spangled banners. There is a language noisy sounding, brawling,
reminiscent of German that is the language I have learned like a roughened
lover. I’ve brushed with my thumbs where his hips slope to thigh, and the
nook between jaw and collar. He slammed my head against the wall
and embraced me in a lock and key I knew I might never fit again (The
Germans have a word dasein for the paradox of being like my mere
state a pull between two hands that stretch). She says they wouldn’t
take me as their own and neither would the Americans. The children of
immigrants rise a new tsunami and these children know the feeling of
swallowing a tide of shame at their mothers’ broken English. These
children know to act the reluctant mediator, because when a mother
speaks broken English and the child knows it like a lover the mother
becomes fragments and child becomes same, like switching
bodies except both are devoid of crucial parts like vessels without
blood and brain. These children want to hear the pin-drop
in a cave that roars stillness to hear the echo of an echo. To look
around, unmoving, in a city swarm, to seize a semblance of knowing, to
say I belong here, with you, with you all, not anywhere else, here,
where any link that snaps homogeneity is an outsider, and I am not. To say,
I belong here, is a travesty. To the shade of your skin or the slant of my
eyes. I wonder what it would be like to write a poem such as this, a long
and lengthy poem, of curious words and stacked phrases, a poem of worlds
and small rivers, to show it to my mother to know she can understand every word
and nothing less. I wouldn’t know. Not in this lifetime. Maybe in another,
we’ll dismantle the walls that encircle us. There is a language of demolition, too.
IV. TO A ZEPHYR WHO WHISTLES FAINTER ON THE YELLOW SEA.
Eyes, Junoesque stars tittering, like she knew I was one of them--
I was one of them--
I am one of them--
Of the galaxies that pervade us, not us, just me—To look inside out intimately and suddenly--
Once again strangers in a city—words crisped to nothings on my teeth--
I marveled myself, a wind borne of two nations, blowing eternal in neither.
Mourning Song
Jeffrey Liao
In the mornings, my grandmother is a tired shadow hunched against the pane
of her bedroom window. She cups my cheeks, smooth as a boy’s, in her
weathered palms – lined like the mud-slabbed banks of the Yangtze, where a thousand bloody
footsteps linger – and searches for warmth in my soft face, so similar to her brother’s,
whose only trace of existence is a dusty photograph in the attic, where all the junk lies.
I’ve memorized the kerosene in her eyes, twin flames reeking of ashes and formaldehyde,
the burnt fragments of a family fractured, a village plundered, a country fallen.
Before bed, my grandmother rubs the silk fibers of her flowing cerulean dress,
the same dress she wore on lazy summer afternoons roaming barefoot with her brother
over warm yellow grass. It’s become a daily ritual: my grandmother sitting in the porch rocking chair
when the air is swollen with silence, her tiny frame silhouetted by the first orange light of dawn,
the world holding its breath like the pause before thunder. I imagine her now –
bringing her weary fingers over the fabric that billows like an ocean in her lap, her hands reaching for
the distant memory of her brother’s laughter, rushing over river rocks like birdsong,
the now foreign sound.
Jeffrey Liao
In the mornings, my grandmother is a tired shadow hunched against the pane
of her bedroom window. She cups my cheeks, smooth as a boy’s, in her
weathered palms – lined like the mud-slabbed banks of the Yangtze, where a thousand bloody
footsteps linger – and searches for warmth in my soft face, so similar to her brother’s,
whose only trace of existence is a dusty photograph in the attic, where all the junk lies.
I’ve memorized the kerosene in her eyes, twin flames reeking of ashes and formaldehyde,
the burnt fragments of a family fractured, a village plundered, a country fallen.
Before bed, my grandmother rubs the silk fibers of her flowing cerulean dress,
the same dress she wore on lazy summer afternoons roaming barefoot with her brother
over warm yellow grass. It’s become a daily ritual: my grandmother sitting in the porch rocking chair
when the air is swollen with silence, her tiny frame silhouetted by the first orange light of dawn,
the world holding its breath like the pause before thunder. I imagine her now –
bringing her weary fingers over the fabric that billows like an ocean in her lap, her hands reaching for
the distant memory of her brother’s laughter, rushing over river rocks like birdsong,
the now foreign sound.
and then it rained
Michelle Hsia
Worn out ring of imprint, kissing a double decker lipstick stain
on mahogany wood where
The sentimental whisper outside the door
Played too loud to ignore
Bonsoir, the trees whispered
To my pomegranate shaped glass
And there hung
Dripped
Red sweat like rapid fire staccato
Onto a carpet that lay like a bed of snow - oh no
How loud did past meet present
Predicate predicate predicate
As windows spun too fast for us to see
You smiled sadly
As I strained to reach the chandelier
One arm outstretched
To hold you
To press you
Between the pages of the dictionary on the second shelf
I’ll find you somewhere beside “hymn”, somewhere beyond “anticipation”
Kept safe
Among weed and wildflower
Michelle Hsia
Worn out ring of imprint, kissing a double decker lipstick stain
on mahogany wood where
The sentimental whisper outside the door
Played too loud to ignore
Bonsoir, the trees whispered
To my pomegranate shaped glass
And there hung
Dripped
Red sweat like rapid fire staccato
Onto a carpet that lay like a bed of snow - oh no
How loud did past meet present
Predicate predicate predicate
As windows spun too fast for us to see
You smiled sadly
As I strained to reach the chandelier
One arm outstretched
To hold you
To press you
Between the pages of the dictionary on the second shelf
I’ll find you somewhere beside “hymn”, somewhere beyond “anticipation”
Kept safe
Among weed and wildflower
2.1
Ana Chen
the little deaths, too: paper pins. sacred glass. snail shells.
silence ferments into the sinister as
i strip the wings from your chest. at least
this is how the dream goes, clutched tight to bitter awakenings, held ungentle
to the desperate. a heaving sickness, viscera marinating
into woman. growing pains
at the hands of the stillborn, the steadfast - this breed of loyalty
bitten hard & proud between tongues.
with a slight shpeck the glue comes lose. i pinch the feathers, unsure
of how best to dispose them. you choose: trash, compost, a fire in the woods, a sharp swift death
like a baby bird? i
do not remember. my head pulsates, an orange in heat - peels stick sweatlike
to a matted mane. men sing drunkendly in the skies
from which you fell, so i holler back, bellow a defiance that boomerangs
soft and sickly, mashed like eggs or sweet potatoes in my fingers.
friday morning, mama
pulls you and me from school. the therapist
is a kind woman. & i want nothing more than to dismember her: clipboard
by clipboard, yellow sheets & skin. gears & glasses caught in slo-mo frames,
tell me there is something left.
the unoriginal. the crusading. the crucifixed. these men, i tell you. their skulls will crush sullen
beneath our breaths. you scorn me. january is a late fledgling, a reluctant shiver
in crossed arms - in winter, these hills
are so much harder to climb.
once when we were little we
trapped a snail, watched it through a glass bowl
until it shriveled & died. for days afterwards you
prodded it, snapped its shell like
the neck of a chicken, & cried. that was
the first time i hated you, your pudginess, the way only you
could drown so slowly, mired waist-deep
in your youthful lethality. but why did it
go? you kept wailing. we loved it
so much, we loved it
so much.
Ana Chen
the little deaths, too: paper pins. sacred glass. snail shells.
silence ferments into the sinister as
i strip the wings from your chest. at least
this is how the dream goes, clutched tight to bitter awakenings, held ungentle
to the desperate. a heaving sickness, viscera marinating
into woman. growing pains
at the hands of the stillborn, the steadfast - this breed of loyalty
bitten hard & proud between tongues.
with a slight shpeck the glue comes lose. i pinch the feathers, unsure
of how best to dispose them. you choose: trash, compost, a fire in the woods, a sharp swift death
like a baby bird? i
do not remember. my head pulsates, an orange in heat - peels stick sweatlike
to a matted mane. men sing drunkendly in the skies
from which you fell, so i holler back, bellow a defiance that boomerangs
soft and sickly, mashed like eggs or sweet potatoes in my fingers.
friday morning, mama
pulls you and me from school. the therapist
is a kind woman. & i want nothing more than to dismember her: clipboard
by clipboard, yellow sheets & skin. gears & glasses caught in slo-mo frames,
tell me there is something left.
the unoriginal. the crusading. the crucifixed. these men, i tell you. their skulls will crush sullen
beneath our breaths. you scorn me. january is a late fledgling, a reluctant shiver
in crossed arms - in winter, these hills
are so much harder to climb.
once when we were little we
trapped a snail, watched it through a glass bowl
until it shriveled & died. for days afterwards you
prodded it, snapped its shell like
the neck of a chicken, & cried. that was
the first time i hated you, your pudginess, the way only you
could drown so slowly, mired waist-deep
in your youthful lethality. but why did it
go? you kept wailing. we loved it
so much, we loved it
so much.
no martyrs
Anonymous
barter. and
there is something in the night. snowman
decorations, your skin seamless
and frosty. and dead. morning glittering in
the shuffle of slippers, in lights so bright they
hollow out half
my face.
lathered in you, there is always a
bubble of cold beneath the sheets, one
i’m too scared to pop. by that i mean, you
should be afraid. by that i mean,
loneliness does not need
a martyr. there are things
you shouldn’t breach, and my palms
are one of them.
Anonymous
barter. and
there is something in the night. snowman
decorations, your skin seamless
and frosty. and dead. morning glittering in
the shuffle of slippers, in lights so bright they
hollow out half
my face.
lathered in you, there is always a
bubble of cold beneath the sheets, one
i’m too scared to pop. by that i mean, you
should be afraid. by that i mean,
loneliness does not need
a martyr. there are things
you shouldn’t breach, and my palms
are one of them.