Konglish

Abstract

My message and my proclamation Were not with persuasive words and wisdom But with a demonstration of spirit and power. I CORINTHIANS 2:4 Neon: Seoul to Busan Each soldier was a sun burning the city & the city a rhyme I rapped to, glowing blue, or was it yellow, or just a rainbow growing and leaping from store to store, eye to eye, TVs emitting movie explosions, dramatic faces, other people laughing at those faces; vendors wedging their bicycle bars past human traffic, Mother pulling me up the overpass & over crowds of black moptops underneath—only faces, floating faces, or I must be a spirit, invisible. She tried to feed me like the ghosts I fed by placing them in my memory. Food for the dead, food for the living— all the same for love, continuous in bodies wet with history. There was neon in the forever-lit sky of all the faces— a long, oozing flame bright as the bombs [End Page 172] that fell here long ago, flames I felt I could touch in the reflection of my mother's glasses. Snow: Busan, 1993 Children lined up & sang the national anthem, of mountains past the DMZ & orchids that withered into white-horsed carousels & my hands sweating to calisthenics in the schoolyard, where we danced for martyrs & patriots. When it snowed it meant the Japanese had ripped their own clothes & thrown them into the sky—white of surrender, white as the palm of my tutor's hands, whiter than the orchids in his cards: Orchids not Moo-goong-hwa Snow not Noon Every subzero day I walked home, the Red Light District warmed my face to a glowing persimmon, where women offered calisthenics, where hustlers shuffled American whiskey & the cold of my mother's ring waited as punishment. My sister put scented flowers in her bra & in the dark, it snowed with every unhooking. Snow was not angelic but something that came down & turned black in the streets. My friends & I tore up the poems of exile & ennui & our imprints in the snow became pictures to fill, history erasing itself. [End Page 173] Busan: Electric Garden 1 Soon, city lights will domino to the very edge of the port city docks, and light up the hungry white faces. The shops will release wild flower-color neon slogans: cool-cool jacket-up delicious, yeah! 2 Once, there was a body in my house that did not speak, that did not sleep, but sang: In this land I feel cold. In this house I will stay With the brothers Whom I killed. I leaned over the casket & touched the cotton sleeves tied three times for the ceremony. 3 Kate wants to impress me in bed, with her knowledge of Korean funerals. [End Page 174] You tie the knot three times. You bury them in the mountain. You circle the wine three times around the grave. But I know that face—mute, unmoving Dahp-dahp ha da! Untranslatable confinement. 4 Finding a body I thought was dead already, that in my name became two letters, living, fusing: memory and brilliance. 5 I am the last caretaker, stooping for the watering of collapsed orchids, scattered beneath plastic sunflowers. I Love You When We're in Busan Gum like a tooth rattles in your mouth & my sunglasses burnish bronze kettles hanging from your hands & the night sky like every sky in any city shouts into your face—hands clapping a message right into your eyes. So, remember how the train comes chuckling past your apartment;how the bicycle is repeatedly stolen even when you put two locks around its neck; & how the rosary Sister Kim put in your hands slipped like water beads from a pink basin— though your hands against the steamed window open a new window: two eyes [End Page 175] with ten strong lashes pointing in all directions. They gather voices: of aging merchants; of wireworks veining the neighborhood; of night traffic in Dae-Shin-Dong; of factory steam making the air smell like rotten fish. Woman, you keep me busy...