Cyclical Renunciations
No more photographs in waiting.
No more visuals from inner eye
purged, nor visions of dreams
we cannot grasp in our everyday.
I’ve dropped my life through life itself,
only to find in its metal of night
there were never any visions, nor words,
nor will-bes. I cannot abide in what
I believe. I cannot abide, and yet,
I am time. Already I have swallowed
into my mouth a world and its next.
Already on the train sometimes
I hear our running through canola
fields, shoulders brushing stem after
stem, your hand still grasping mine,
weak with happiness. Today I clutch
weeping yellow of leaves,
my fist wet, their residue slipping
to the earth like seeds I will never watch
blossom into auburn shadow.
Only then do I remember
leaves are not seeds, and find, once more,
my unbearable laughter and its
sting. I want to learn
to see without the framing
of the world I have built through
enclosures that were never mine.
Is this shudder not somehow
my chest, my shoulders, my heart?
I want to see again. I want to see.
I want to see.
‘Community’ is a grief field
white chrysanthemums 걱정하지마 엄마
bodies on the hills, in the hills grandfather wept, all his age collapsing, i see
her grin, eyes wrinkled like the stars “여기도 없다” of the earth, near, near, your hands
aged, tree lines streaming from the mountains clinging to me, i have not
fled, her body – lost, her family lost, her
wet fingers
mauve-stained
as she brings the bowl over, murmuring
“딸기 먹어” into not-mindful dreamings
so sweet i could hardly eat two or three, tongues sucked dry
dried the flood of 우유 and her reveries,
her hair of this affection, sweet-smelling, fraying strings
falling beneath her limbs of half-open buds, seven
years of curling to form a mouth,
her eyes gave me other memories
as they peered up to see a different 딸, a younger sibling, mother once her child
thoughts grinding into powder thrown up in wisps how larger now our skies once smaller
how our aging scatters across our youth,
scattering from shapes we cannot see, shapes we have ourselves shattered
여기서, 여기서, 할머니
her voice on the phone, palms
upon silk green sheets she weaved herself in a different life
clutching her smell so warm and we rest
insisting, the magnanimity of her history, we have lost so much already
white chrysanthemums, curling above her body,
white chrysanthemums, curling her body with spring,
the day was violent when she was buried.
여기서, 여기서, 어머니
나는 큰 소리로
속삭이듯
to the hills mother shivers into sun and runs
to hills she climbs inside 말했다
her cradled years snow pressed
residues between our white
winters folding into loams we live
insisting the lucent lamplights
grown we clutch each other
close, once more unwhole
kyung (they/) is a medic and leather harness maker living on Peoria, Potawatomi, Miami, Sioux, Kickapoo, and Kaskaskia lands in South Side Chicago. Their commitments delve into community-led crisis & street herbalism, liberatory practices of queer/trans care, and anti-imperial lineages of memory. Their poetry appears in Meridian, Radar, Tiger Moth Review, and elsewhere.