Wavelength // Waveless

Yesterday, eomma called from     halfway     across

the world with news

                            that she has cancer.

It’s supposed to be a secret,        she whispered

into the phone, her voice quivering like a sparrow—

           its earthquake-shaken wings wired         into the telephone buzz.

Earlier, eomma left        for Korea

in search of a new apartment.         Yesterday, she delayed

                      her flight home by one more month.

In our Californian house, the unwashed spoons

            in the left          sink float around

like corpses at sea.

                      I scavenge for eomma’s silver-soft body

in the pot of abalone porridge,          in the reflections

of rusted silverware, unable to find her thumbprints anywhere.

Eomma says,

                 the dead will live in the waves of  your palms,

                 the          hollow         of   your mouth,

but I don’t want her to shrink into low-tide scraps

of flesh that cannot echo my name.

                        When my brother calls her,

she’s at the hospital waiting for the chemotherapist.

She tells him,      I’m at the beauty salon,

             as if cosmetics can     erase     islands of tears

                          from her face.

——

I grew up by the sea,

            witnessing death        after       death

as mackerels perish with the flick of a knife.

At the wet market,

                       the fishmongers fillet the fish without ever looking down

at their upturned lifelines,         without ever

exhaling psalms of rebirth. Even then, eomma was immune

           to decay,          stringing shells into necklaces—

           leashes to hold onto bodies

of water.          Water remembers most, she would preach,

her feet baptized in the hush of the waves.

                              Overhead, planes would wheeze past our heads,

caught in asphyxiation.           Eomma would laugh with eyes

           unweathered by age, shouting,

I will never leave my country, my ocean, my daughter,

wrapping me in the briny lyrics of the foaming tides.

Even now, with eomma in Korea,          I ask for comfort

in the waves that have carried her over to America—

              waves bleached white with fatigue,           a receding

              hairline. How her skin yellows into wallpapers

at the hospital ward.         At night,

I can’t help but stare at the goosebumps on the ceiling

                          that resemble a sea of faces

disfigured by the gravitational pull of time, of moonless nights.

The nightmares about eomma         metamorphose into

            a reality—sweat pooling around her body

in the middle of the night, her face shrinking into medicine pills,

her throat unable to swallow        back her saltwater tears,

                      stinging and wearing away her skin.

——

In our house, we mention surgery

more frequently than         survival,

              unaccustomed to the language of loss.

From halfway across the world,

                          I hear the rupture in eomma’s voice,

split open like the red sea.          Outside, the sky bloodied

by eomma’s spasms—the sky raining teeth.

               For the first time,

I notice death in the negative space behind my body—

and not just in the imaginary universes in my poems.

                          The mirrors grayed at their corners

and mold bloating into malignant tumors on the bedroom walls.

               Day by day, eomma masters the art of falling—

teeth, hair, obsidian tears.          I am yearning for a surgeon

who can stitch back the wounds of this world,

               yearning for a miracle

               that will never wash up on our shore.

See, only the formless bodies are attracted to the ocean,

                       the ones wrinkled by imminent death.

In the end, eomma was wrong:

              water does not remember,

              nor does it          heal.

Water hungers, draining her life out            in metastasis.