ISSUE 06   ||   FALL / WINTER 2009

Pyongyang Phantom Feeling, 1952

Mary Chi-Whi Kim

For my N. Korean aunt, Bo Ok, severed from us for more than 55 years

Would that I were still with you, comrade,

cupping your right patella,

a peninsula of flesh dangling

to fill your shoe,

black canvas with rubber soles,

so proletariat of us. But enemy

airstrikes scoured the air, Yankee

planes drove down on us in Great

Leader’s factory. A barrage of blasts

incinerated walls, obliterated me into

a crimson hail of meat and bone.

One scrap of marrow flung beneath

your left temple, here I whisper

memories of you, child of fourteen,

racing across schoolyards,

first in your class until no more

yard, no more school--finish line

for a Southern farmer's girl while

Younger Brother speeds through more.

You run away from your childhood

family in Daegu's starlight,

forage a path through land mines,

barbed wire dividing brother armies,

black braid whipping your back.