another year, another drive home at christmas
alone
the stark fingers of trees
the flocking of birds the point
passing reservoir road
there is always something
white horizon of endless trouble
if god had given me wings
i’d beat them mile after aching mile
toward bread sugar shimmer
the barest hint of something better
bitterness ever-present, preserved
on the next hill-crest
christ, i am tired
the lull of the road carries me forward
like a second set of hands
their weight at my back thick & tangible
again closing the distance between
my body & what i am afraid of
i am always wrestling with how to love you better
some balm amongst the bitter
leaning back against the tungsten edge of my heart
that is always swallowing me whole
& the road stretches like sinew
clings like bread dough wretched & soft
i’m captive recumbent recurrent
this journey, year after year
this corvid heart, the weary muscle of it —
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
standing in the kitchen alone
i shape the dough into a long snake,
divide & roll the tiny circles out
thin as a blade.
yesterday i spent my afternoon
squeezing water from cabbage & zucchini
to make the filling, remembering
the times i’ve spent beside my mother
making mandu in her kitchen.
i recall what she taught me
about cooking, about how
a young woman ought to behave.
i know trying to change her mind
is like kneading water from a stone.
my kitchen is bright, but a bulb overhead
is dimming more each day.
does a small scrap of possibility
still bubble somewhere
despite the weight of our past?
if we stay here forever, stone-faced,
wringing out tears, will we ever find out?
what more, 엄마, do you want from me?
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
chuseok, 2023
the near-full moon is ripe & orange
over the airport today at 7 am.
i see death at every corner.
feel it in every jolt of the plane.
after circling laguardia in clouds
so thick they weigh me down
we land, fawnlegged & stomachless
to flooded highways, to emergency.
loss is a kind of holding pattern,
where nothing changes even as the world
bends itself ever deeper
into a chaos of our own making.
we watch the sewers fill with rain,
try to soothe the scab of generational wound
by careening on, like children
whose mothers’ mothers lost their way.