POETRY
Yejin Suh, Jeffrey Liao, Krysta Lee Frost, Nikita Bhardwaj, Michelle Hsia, Kirby Marquez
Yejin Suh, Jeffrey Liao, Krysta Lee Frost, Nikita Bhardwaj, Michelle Hsia, Kirby Marquez
Yeoboseyo (isolation)
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 (isolation)
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.
Curse (allure)
Krysta Lee Frost
My mother is most beautiful
when she is dancing.
And so she never taught me.
Krysta Lee Frost
My mother is most beautiful
when she is dancing.
And so she never taught me.
warcry (allure)
Nikita Bhardwaj
my father is a gambling man;
he rolls dice and my mama rolls out dough
and together they scream like the drones in the sky
are sinking kisses in the shoreline, furrows in earth like
crescents in my skin, mamas grip unyielding.
they say that the mountains are alive and stumbling
through our house. that we live to die, live to
knife uranium into the veins of nonbelievers.
at school my brother learns to shoot
for the stars, tear white from bone, and
I braid tripwire into my hair. day breaks
like flickering candle; this is why
my father folds cards as the
men from another sun fold us
into paper planes. we fly high and sing lullabies
with hell-raisers, knowing silence
after strike means the village is asleep,
so pray to the god with no name.
scream war. spit revenge. because
I can’t see the stars anymore.
Nikita Bhardwaj
my father is a gambling man;
he rolls dice and my mama rolls out dough
and together they scream like the drones in the sky
are sinking kisses in the shoreline, furrows in earth like
crescents in my skin, mamas grip unyielding.
they say that the mountains are alive and stumbling
through our house. that we live to die, live to
knife uranium into the veins of nonbelievers.
at school my brother learns to shoot
for the stars, tear white from bone, and
I braid tripwire into my hair. day breaks
like flickering candle; this is why
my father folds cards as the
men from another sun fold us
into paper planes. we fly high and sing lullabies
with hell-raisers, knowing silence
after strike means the village is asleep,
so pray to the god with no name.
scream war. spit revenge. because
I can’t see the stars anymore.
More or Less Moral-less – Interlude (entropy)
Michelle Hsia
Running tumbling falling crawling screaming crying lying lying lying
The ceiling fan came down during your fight
I was there in the hallway, striped shadow tiger with silent steps
Waiting for your lamp to flicker 1 time 2 times 3 times
Safe!
Come!
Home!
The many nights I spent at your door counting, drowning in clock hands and sheep
While you battled the fever we couldn’t break
I was there beside the holes in the walls that knew each other too well
Choking on my heartbeat when bone bent broke snapped
Now.
Or.
Never.
I was there to see tattered pages arrested with twice-stamped tickets
You held me close, the word “promise” across your breast
Opening timing climbing jumping sprinting crying sighing sighing sighing
Oh, I remember how good it felt when we flew
Michelle Hsia
Running tumbling falling crawling screaming crying lying lying lying
The ceiling fan came down during your fight
I was there in the hallway, striped shadow tiger with silent steps
Waiting for your lamp to flicker 1 time 2 times 3 times
Safe!
Come!
Home!
The many nights I spent at your door counting, drowning in clock hands and sheep
While you battled the fever we couldn’t break
I was there beside the holes in the walls that knew each other too well
Choking on my heartbeat when bone bent broke snapped
Now.
Or.
Never.
I was there to see tattered pages arrested with twice-stamped tickets
You held me close, the word “promise” across your breast
Opening timing climbing jumping sprinting crying sighing sighing sighing
Oh, I remember how good it felt when we flew
Iris (entropy)
Kirby Marquez
And I’d give up forever to touch you
What saved me when the world could not
When a system of blood and brothers
The intercession of saints and therapists
And I
Fell short of the glory of saviors
A dance partner
Who holds my body against treble
Bass drums turned heart transplants
A textured voice that touches my ears
Sing to me on sunshiney days
Bring back broken memories with rain-soaked melodies
Butterflies and awful dates
Lullabies and nightmares
Words that spoke how I felt
Riffs, licks, hooks and ladders
Lilted words that tilted their heads with commiseration
Bold ones that
Picked up your pain and
Put it on a pedestal
You felt it, the
Belted lyrics,
The face-melting cry:
Yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive.
Kirby Marquez
And I’d give up forever to touch you
What saved me when the world could not
When a system of blood and brothers
The intercession of saints and therapists
And I
Fell short of the glory of saviors
A dance partner
Who holds my body against treble
Bass drums turned heart transplants
A textured voice that touches my ears
Sing to me on sunshiney days
Bring back broken memories with rain-soaked melodies
Butterflies and awful dates
Lullabies and nightmares
Words that spoke how I felt
Riffs, licks, hooks and ladders
Lilted words that tilted their heads with commiseration
Bold ones that
Picked up your pain and
Put it on a pedestal
You felt it, the
Belted lyrics,
The face-melting cry:
Yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive.