GOODBYE, KORYÕ INN The Double Image I used to imagine falling asleep in my dream, even if in that darkness I was merely entering the country behind my mother’s eyes. Now I live between the window and cutting board, where spring makes its reports. I thought the rain was supposed to protect me from greening things. But like it, I have never quite arrived—like grasses I am only recovered, recovering, or recovered from. So I try to let mothers go, since one is supposed to come out of a wound slowly, catch it on a day when its reflection is no longer changing. We are windowless interiors. I shiver in fear of the one who lives there— in my dream I played truant; in the mirror, I failed to appear. I can never fit into the size of my life before the end of a poem, before she returns and tucks my smooth body into the back of a taxi. We move together as the stillness of Gwangju rises to greet us, its ashen hands a waving cordon as we reach higher ground. She lays me out with my shoes and my folded shirt so I will not be too cold, and the white fabric unfurls and tosses and dresses me in the wind. The sun is higher now, c ontracts shadow— a plane blows spring frost over cut grass— I think this time I might choose experience, I say, and hear the silent height reply with fields opening into houses, small and feeling.
10
SERIN LEE
(AB’21)
