We traded voice notes on Instagram, like
pages from our diaries. “I’m sad,” the hollow
notch cloaking your throat / left me a cluster
of ranunculus that broke
and skittered across the kitchen tile
like silenced 쌀. Did you know
that our mother’s throats, too, punctured
through that coulee centered
there, where sparrows rarely land and yet, a ring
as rounded wounds open, bare?
Indented, a thumb carried the brown bird
to my window, yesterday, together with a pamphlet for
“work at home” insurance policies and a new membership
card for the local arboretum where I like to run inside a green
cocoon. When the branches, still, the leaves shuffle, I hear
the hollow song your mother sang to you when
we were both little
and afraid of what waited beyond the screen door--
“I’m lonely,” is gorgeous in its long indolence, in the ashes
left from yesterday’s rain, still caked along the sly half moon, like an unseen
secret, maybe a name we can’t quite re-collect, lost
along the way from that screen door and the sparrow’s shudder, slitting
my chest, as Hahlmuhnee counts
chili seeds for summer. The finch’s chants,
a dull thud, where there is no hollow
more strength, either, to hurl four-lettered words
at the TV screen. I watch / a policeman turns his back
to a man drowning in open air, I watch / a policeman buries
an octet of rice grains because “it was a bad day,” and a vector
grows between the two, “there is the grey horizon,”
I reply, as it stretches around me before
I can swallow the ocean.
Omma tells me she has tennis elbow. She can
no longer julienne the vegetables for 잡채.
I want to cover my mother’s body with my own, in the same way
my husband’s shadow looms over mine along the subway tracks,
inside the lush ovaries of Central Park, but I can’t seem to find
the words to tell him that my mother’s name sounds too much,
too much like six grains of buried rice, but maybe you are
who I love / my finger dips / the sparrow’s
feet landed, there, and Omma’s silver song
washes over both of us,
as we collide,
as we shiver.
Seed Text: Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love”