How to write a Korean poem
without too much blood. In harabeoji’s garden,
I find everything divided: the earth unstitched,
all the flowers kneeling. Every wrinkle on his
palms a memory outliving its own skin. He speaks
slowly, braiding each word into a water lily: this
moment at the edge of the Yangjaecheon where
the mouthfuls of hardtack he tosses to the carp
crumble into teeth. Tracing the shoreline, though
this myth of red jaws opened long before the war’s
end. Before this blooming thirst. On Sundays, he leaves
windflowers at the altar, gardening this white
smoke into prayer—everything paler in the
lamplight. Mid-hymn, his mouth blossoms
into a flock of tongues, shorn of its history. Nothing
left to bury, he tells me. Not on this side of the glass,
where this language of petals can only wither into
elegy. Over the phone, his accent splinters, never
learning to settle in seawater — those deboned
syllables soft, slick with oil. On the page,
a translation at war with itself. In every life, we
flee south, watch flowers emerge from bullets,
dye the Nakdong red with bleeding-hearts. I wait
to tell him I write about the war. Because in this
parable of borders, fragility is only a body bent
into italics, a bloodline tangled in the spokes
of a bicycle. Just this wilting metaphor, its sagging
limbs. Something to whiten the page. In winter,
harabeoji plants camellias. I try to remember the
way the autumn leaves, how each season unthreads
itself into the next. In the greenhouse, I measure time
in dying houseplants, meaning for every bruised
peony I leave on the doorstep a sentence splits,
rootless. Forgive me for all this blood, for this
red-choked silt—for the ghosts rising from the
flowerbed despite the way the folktale ends.
Nine-tailed and starving. How easily the spade
slips out of my hand—this, too, a way to hunger
for an origin.
disorient
Daniel Yim is a writer from San Jose, CA. His work has been recognized by the Pulitzer Center, YoungArts, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship, he is also an avid cellist.