By Yuna Kang
PROMPT—Ask Me.
0.
It is hard enough to love you-
harder still to remember you.
I scribble down the final pulses of trauma you gave me,
hoping to lessen the pain.
I.
blue cathartic bruises you rub over and over
to create fresh new roses that smell of
stale cyanide and cigarette-stained dreams.
II.
Dissociating figure, who can’t see fire from mist,
misses lost beloveds and remembers them as ghosts, like gwisin
looming in the corner, like demons on their chest, pinning down,
are they figures of oppression in silvery hues, are they
III.
i want to take away the pain and the suffering, to take away
the world from your eyes, because it causes you a never-ending anguish but maybe
you are your anguish, gnawing fresh scars over and over into yourself,
making yourself die, making me watch and
asking me to save you from your own, self-constructed nightmare.
IV.
En el verano,
yo quiero más tiempo contigo, pero,
things slip away from our fingers-
and articulations of old memories
become sketches, and then skeletal figurines, hardly worthy of their
former fully-fledged and colorful glory, but
that seems to be
V.
And in this summer diaspora, where I imagine us in shape and color, I forget
what it meant to see you live as a dead being, and now I want to bury you
Under the huge roses and honeysuckles of childhood memory.
That don’t seem to exist anymore, but I have dug open a plot for you,
and I am waiting for the last vestiges of you to politely lay down,
to stop fighting, and to rest once and for all.
VI.
light enters the mind and leaves,
the window lays ajar, mouth gaping,
the breeze hints at willow leaves and honeysuckle and
closing down.
Yuna Kang is a queer, Korean-American writer based in Northern California who is currently attending UC Berkeley. She has been published in several places, such as Rising Phoenix Press, One Sentence Poems, Sierra Journal, and more.