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.

 

 


Yejin Suh

Yejin Suh is a writer based in New Jersey whose work appears in places like Half Mystic and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is the founder of Wintermute Lit, a speculative fiction, poetry, and art publication. She hangs out at https://ya-suh.blogspot.com/.

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