Poem for Colonization and Forgotten War
& say that it was a war on the 38th.
say that uncle was torn from niece, say that brother
shot brother in cold blood through
the right eyeball. say the names, not in katakana, but
in rightful han-gu-geo. Let our dirty language
stick to the crevices of your bloodless mouths:
Say that two-hundred thousand comfort women were taken hostage,
say that mothers were forced to throw their babies off
the hard crates of mountain like bags of stone. say that war is never a game,
say that we have no right
to make jokes out of a death we did not live nor bore on our peninsula. say that
post-bellum is never not post-mortem.
know that my grandma cannot read
Shakespeare nor Kafka, so say that it’s not wrong
that I write two-lined stanzas that can be easily
translated by mothers. say that it’s fine to not have rhyme
when there’s history that is latent,
crumbling like our witnesses of the border that reeks our nation.
say that history is Eurocentric textbooks as much
as it is grandma’s last memories of the snicker bars they
gave to bone-starved little girls,
of the gingko tree that withered when her father gambled into
bankruptcy. say that all of her memories
are worth preserving and say that no war is
ever good. In our pacifist, peace-seeking, perfectly moral world.
Ji Hyo Kim is a student writer hailing from Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review and Beyond Words Magazine. She is the winner of the 2025 Letter Review Prize in Poetry and currently the co-editor-in-chief of the Magpie. She is an alumna of the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program, Kenyon Review Workshops, and Sewanee Young Writers Conference.