New Year’s Day! I was stuffed from eating too many rice cakes. My favorites are the ones with chestnuts in the middle. It was so cold that my fingers were ready to snap off, but I still went over to my friend’s house to play. Then I heard a machine gun and saw a swarm of soldiers. They looked like ants against the snow. Come out! they shouted. We will kill you all! But my friend and I kept on playing. We pretended it was summer and made green noodles by rolling up camellia leaves and slicing them ever so thinly. Now all the village people were rounded up. My mom was crying, and I had never seen her cry before. Maybe that’s why I started crying too. The soldiers made us go up the hill into the forest where my mom and I picked chestnuts. I was in such a panic that I didn’t realize my shoes had come off. I cried even more. I hate being shoeless more than anything in the world. I held onto my mom’s hand and turned around because the soldiers told us to. I looked down at the pit. I couldn’t see anything but dirt. I thought to myself, How will I ever find my shoes again? Then suddenly my mom floated up in the air again and again. Somehow I was already lying beneath her. Somehow a bullet pierced through my left foot. Somehow it was so quiet that I could hear everything inside my head. Somehow I jumped up. All the corpses were burning. Somehow my mom was headless. My uncle, covered in blood, acted crazy. Somehow somehow. We ran across the creek and up the mountain. The soldiers saw us and started shooting again.
Author’s Note on “The Orphans”
These imagined accounts are based on what Ahn-Kim told me when I met with her in 2016. She also gave me Sancheong-Hamyang Massacres of Civilians (2011), conference proceedings which contain findings and analysis by Ahn-Kim as well as transcribed oral testimonies of the survivors. The year 2011 was the 60th anniversary of the massacre. Thus, these imaginary stories are based on reality—history—yours and mine, and dreams—theirs and mine, and memory—theirs and mine. This is just another way of saying that “The Orphans” are poems, poetry of the unconscious. I first wrote them in Korean, then translated them. It made most sense to deploy my childish handwriting—it didn’t have much of a chance to grow up outside of Korea. These poems in Korean and English are not exactly identical, as no translations are. It’s just that there are always two of us—the eternal twoness.
"Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, by the American poet Rosanna Warren, sets out to restore to Jacob some measure of the literary fame she feels he has been denied....Her greater achievement, however, is her portrait of the tension among art, faith and sexuality in the life of a man Gertrude Stein once said had a 'poet soul.'"
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"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."
