Goodybe, Koryõ Inn..............Serin Lee

The Double Image

SERIN LEE (AB'21)

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.

SERIN LEE (AB’21)

When the Snow Comes, Consider Family

The first word that bubbles up is champagne. “Pretty is as pretty does”—I liked the sound that sparkling made. Other times we were very civil, did not disturb one another. Shot through with orange, the leaves in his shadow come now and are gone, lost to the month’s material. One day I hope to wear them, so light I will not know I have them on. It is cold because we are waiting on narrative. Contract your muscles and hold them to the task of taking inventory; otherwise, the day outpaces time. Magpie beauty sweeps a whole house, shelters the every day. I could not love the automatic women, though I tried. The shape of their waiting is a hand that gives and a hand that receives, one turning over the other in thinning light. To turn over the onions, too, and have them be roses or the cerebral sky. From these cards I cannot know when there will next be flowers, but take off your clothes to better smell the lavender. Consider the hour as it whitens, and its green ray— to cry about nothing is not nothing. We are prescribed something simpler: memory, the world in eight days, and painted windows—all unfolding onto the sidewalk, delicately undecided like pavement blossoms after rain. The light changes: it is midwinter; it is time for me to go. Father has taken the picture, and whichever page you open, there you are.