Before the DMZ, and: Faint

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• Before the DMZ, and: Faint
• Cindy Juyoung Ok (bio)

Before the DMZ

My moth- er sent a photo of the federal build- ing she was being naturalized in, writing, Boring I love you. That winter her father revealed he left behind a first wife, two kids, north before the war, the news unremarkable because For us, everybody had somebody they— So my mother hired an investigator; visited because, newly American, she could. She flew south after, and at her photos, he pointed at the 67-year-old he had last known at seven. Said, She was smart. She was really smart. Within a year he lost his memory to stroke. He cried when they tied him so he could not pull his tubes out and my mother had only seen him cry when the special ran on public broadcast. Ten thou- sand families reunited while every- one watched. Doesn’t anyone k- now this person? Live calls, arti- Gen-facts, tears—she watched erally no him watch. one recalled where they had been separated. But a ripped hem, or rules of a childhood game, that big mole. A port of waiting. I al- ways wanted to hate binary but I grew up here where the cure to forgetting a stubborn chorus is doing simple arithmetic. Her trip north was strange, formal— delicate words, doubtful gestures. She noticed the brother had pso- riasis on his knuckles and hid her laughter in a corner, her scars proof of genes that had skipped the one brother she knew. The countries are linked by land—mostly, I know, by an area covered in stone. I ima- gine jade-colored water between them, a wide, boring o- cean on the thirty- eighth parallel. [End Page 55]

Faint

Vagueness tends to criminalizeand of few available alternativesmy favorite is the dream of the same

room. Pick your noise, in wellsor against walls. In the light

of the microwave clock, under adviceof long symbols, showily I become

my own guest (in mother words,a duty). Oxygen a calm oddityeverywhere but its status more

bounced in bias. To be my chorus,I first had to be a teenager who hoped

to kill the myth of the protagonist,related quarries. Mental trespasses then

of floating down from tall towersdenoted the promise of language’send. In its icon of bloodlessness,

my skin had, has, the potentialto be a good canvas for the palettes

of others. I’m not native to anyplace and so naive to every log—

still want the trees less naked. [End Page 56]

Cindy Juyoung Ok

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale University Press 2024) and teaches poetry at Kenyon College.

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