Debris

my kindergarten hands sculpt sand into castle,
soil into empire. requited imagination
milks reality’s obedience: these fingers & palms know
only the promise of possibility. i

perch aside my halmoni. she tells me
of skies the color of sun.
do you see it?
eyes fall enveloped by echoes of earth
bleeding through war. she relives, recites, survives
again that war: a childhood cankered by habit.

a war that
trades face for farce; spells
letters with sentences and sentences with
paragraphs and paragraphs with licked space,
as if to say:
lies tucked between truth
profess history.

a war that
dwells damp in every breath,
encroaches upon each exhale.
inhale.
do you smell it?
a war that
chisels instruction into skin;
splinters into her name, her
tattered armor, her
scarlet blood: blood clings and curses and carves as it courses through
vein, aching to be known
as it navigates from heart, through body,
only to be sent back again.

she speaks of hunger.
coiling hands caress stomach as she recalls how
her distended belly turned into mound. growls
of malnourishment stray in the landlocked hollow
beneath tongue, above earth: somewhere in between.
do you feel it?

she speaks of the hungry.
not the ones wearing empty bodies yet full hearts, but
the ones raised to ravage, to find way to touch, to
leave their cells dead upon yours.
perhaps
they have a story           too.

neo-neun mwo-ga dweh-go ship-eo?
what do you want to be when you grow up? my halmoni asks as we lie on a trialed earth.
everybody has dream, she hums to the cadence of the quiet.
when I was young, I had dream too. but war took my everything. do you know? the sky was yellow. we
could not go out. I cannot forget any of it.

an aureate sky rendered by dust and screams and tears and smoke, by
whispers fabled by wind, by
gravity tethered from wrist to wrist:
do you remember?
we
tell of skies the color of sun,
she & i.

and as memories reopen wounds we once thought we could escape, they will
burn like cinders borne in a grave. so let them
burn like civilization’s collapsed castles &
civilization’s eroded empires. like

kindergarten hands. as we
return to the present moment, my eyes
cannot help but search for the yellow, for the dust, for the overcast
empty. this time, i am
met with the gaze of

a tree
who longs to touch sky,
branching its way away from ground,
oblivious to the earth that endeavors to hold it close.

so as to remind the world that
the earth too bears memories,
blood seeps through its wrinkles and scars and callous and flesh.
do you see it?    i do

apologize to the earth,
for shaping it in ways it never did           ask.

Hana is a Korean American student from Chicago, Illinois. An avid overthinker, daydreamer, and storyteller, she is intrigued by anything and everything that has to do with perspective.