Poetry: ELEGY FOR OUR PSEUDOHISTORIES by Yejin Suh
In “ELEGY FOR OUR PSEUDOHISTORIES,” the speaker navigates a world of obstacle and trauma. After all, “What is a horse/ if not a vehicle to test its rider.”
ELEGY FOR OUR PSEUDOHISTORIES
All political and social ideologies came alive, in the temporal and spatial sense, in an area completely isolated from the outside world…
—Choi Jungwoon. “The Gwangju Uprising: The Pivotal Democratic Movement That
Changed the History of Modern Korea”
That snaggle-toothed boy kissing the rounded corner
of a truck—knees limp against silver hubcaps, a prayer
hooking him down the roads. Blooming in purpose
and fervor, I believe it. I didn’t believe
the first nursery home fight, nor the second, the third,
but I believe my grandfather on the crimson dusting
his shoes, flowering on the ground, the snaggle-tooth boy
a question of a body. I saw a fake crime scene on TV once:
just four limbs and a head stretched over a
dinosaur fossil (extinct body). A human body inverted
is, after all, only bones reverted, and who’s to say
what belongs on the outside and what doesn’t belong
anywhere at all. How his feet must have pressed
into ground until it was no longer apart from the earth, the earth
merely allowing the soles to part at each step,
pounding home, backpack laced over his head. I know
he scrubbed & scrubbed the shoes long after
their demise—or revival—in sharp motions
like the soldiers dusting their hands. No entry to
Gwang-ju, schoolboys sprinting home the wrong
way, the feet of the students much like those of
the soldiers: bloody & patchworked with wary
intention. Marching perhaps knowing they too
may go extinct a mutilated body and nothing more,
hanging by one incisor.
/
after Franny Choi
Make me three kingdoms. Make me
a continent of sires so wide and endless
they ride like stars in expansion,
thunderously back in time. Hooves
clattering in tandem, metal animals,
great city beasts. What is a horse
if not a vehicle to test its rider, much like
the A-train bucking through Saturday mornings,
gears trembling into slot. Traversing the great
kingdom of transit lines and given enough
berth even Genghis would’ve thought you
fearsome. You say, They’re afraid.
They tell me to go back
to my empire. He says, Defiance
is what propelled the horses.
/
“I was born a woman but never lived as a woman.”
for Kim Hak-Sun, who died without an apology
All I think about is the clean separation of whole objects no blood. Cars and street poles and
Trauma shears can cut through almost anything. Leather and
denim to turn the victim face-up to the heavens,
as if to say Look what you’ve done or Look what you can save,
because made in His image means holding everything against hope,
as if it counts. Do not ask me about cutting. Once, the umbilical was
torn from a child because the child was borne from tearing too—
Skin sloughed from bone to settle in ox bone broth, hanbok in violent sep
aration from a girl’s milky skin. Lured by promise of work
and made to give up the flesh in cycles of centuries. How surgically
brutal the division of cloth and body, of girl and machine,
of woman and her entire life. Of comfort / and / woman, units of war supplies,
they were called. Made in His image is the arrogance to mold a woman
into what she is not, oil-slicked fingers trying to press metal. A war
never atoned. Do not ask me about cutting again, until each bullet
is returned in the shape of their names.