my halabeoji takes a sip of cognac / it is late december / and dusk dawns young / so we gather as he tells his lifestory / to a room of generations / a breathing memory of centuries / of dusty dreams / we are / a breathing memory / of centuries / of dusty dreams / he tells us / of how he came to this / country / hungry / dirt upon knees / how he traversed sea and sky and sacrifice / all for this / for grandaughter to succumb / strip / sell out homeland / in want of “home” in this land / and in this land textbooks entangle with toiled fables / as make-believe and believe-what-we-make / lullaby me to sleep / spell lies so desperately beautiful / so desperate to be beautiful / i cannot help but read them / as truth / in your version / of our story / there is a girl / who looks like my face / my eyes / my ears / except you / do not let her have a mouth / so i forget i have a tongue / trade my people’s memories / for your people’s dreams / amnesia / rewrites the written of worn skin / we live / we die / we people a tattering history wearing borrowed names / gowned in ghosts and / drunked in dream / sing as if we are not still drowning / in crimson / i do not understand / where did my feet go? / why is the carpet rising? / am i seeping into the ground? / why do i seep into the ground? / where is my spine? / i cannot move / my limbs are paralyzed / forget the very thing that gave me life / and i am only a head now / a yawning nation swallows me / until i am bodiless / a corpse whispers into my buried ears / another day has come away / only two eyes now / everything else has subsumed into grave / and there is just enough of me left / to see the world / i could have kept / could have been / instead / today / oblivion coils into unnamed graves / it fastens to my unfastened body / so we fall lost in the atlantic’s borrowed body / drowned by waters / who no longer remember their sky / i curtsy to acquiescent apology / and habit / this is how you live / to die / forget / and descend / drunkenly

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By Kelly Suh

A poem about navigating immigration, a “hyphenated identity,” and feelings of ambiguity and otherness. The speaker’s “descent” is both literal and metaphorical–both in the vein of generational lineage, and in the metaphorical vein of being consumed by a foreign land, its myths, and its expectations. As the body and history unravel, the poem contemplates a descent into both memory and oblivion.