Because the H-Mart in Plaza Market is Closing
—after twenty-three years
Because I must walk through the bell-song
of this door one last time, must walk past
displays of dried squid & hanging leather prayers,
because I grip a bottle of banana milk
and taste the artificial sweetness of childhood
shame. Because the ahjumma's eyes are red-
rimmed as gochugaru, because she folds
dollar bills and won into her apron pocket
Because I am ashamed of how I avoided
this place for years—the pickled garlic
breath of it, k-dramas eternally blaring
from the mounted television, the uncles
who call every young boy or grandson. Because
standing in line behind church women
to buy ssal for songpyeon, I must rest
my palms on this counter worn smooth
by twenty-three years of hands reaching
across the vernacular for perfect change.
Because the developers wait outside
like prairie vultures, blueprints dreaming. Because
I take my place among the emigrants
and children who look like me—because
I am ashamed of our shared grief, how it pools
in the aisles between the rice wine & Michelle
Zauner pilgrims. Because, when I pay, I stumble
over 감사합니다, syllables foreign, pebbling
my mouth. Because she answers anyway, counts
change into my palm with an old-country politeness
I recognize but never learned to return. Because
I'm sorry for the years I pretended
not to understand, for how I'd answer
in English when she spoke Korean.
What a betrayal, my tongue.
The ginseng candy she slips into my palm
forgives. I am a question written
in two scripts: the one I was
born into, and the one I chose.
Both are incomplete. Tomorrow
the windows will reflect the sky, traffic, anyone but us.
Origami with the Dead
The day she taught me to fold paper cranes
the sky reflected into her hospital bracelet, wrist-
thin plastic as the blue vein of wiper fluid.
Once you fold a thousand of them, your wish comes
spinning from the afternoon light through gauze curtains, ready
to come true. Each time her fingers forgot
the creases, she repeated it, knowing my fingers still
had lessons to learn from hers. I was nine and still believed
in the clean logic of fact. I still believed
imagination could save us, the same way
cranes, once we folded them, stayed cranes.
Outside the window, as contrails dissolved
like snow in water, she folded
the same bird seventeen times, each bird
folded into a slightly different body–some bent
sharper at the neck, some smaller, but each
adopting the same label. Each responding
to the same name. After, I lined them up
on the radiator, a parade of broken umbrellas
watched the storm. That night, I dreamed
of her hands unfolding into paper. Unfolding across
the places she once called home—Prague.
Was it Prague? The bottom of Superior, where
the ships gather for warmth. Where they rest, star-
lit, the drowned ones. I did not mean to
say drowned. Her palms–they lifted us
into each memory she’d gingerly folded
to keep for my stories, for my poems
once I started writing them. Each story
a different city in countries that never learned
how to say her name, how to pronounce
the weight of her body, her stories. These
cranes. Instead, Nairobi pronounced red dust
across the creases of her lifeline, and Prague–
the cobblestones etched themselves beneath
her fingernails. And Superior’s lake floor, the dark space
between her knuckles each time she presses
her wishes for me into another creased crane.
Collin Kim has earned recognition from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the Pulitzer Center. His work appears in publications including American High School Poets and DePaul's BlueBook.