homonyms as in daegu love, halmoni as in to know & to ache
by Sal Kang
—쌀이라고 해봐, 쌀.
a quiet afternoon. some comedy program blaring out on the 테레비, which we
watch together as she runs her fingers through my hair. 서울말은 끝말만 올리면
되는 거 모르니? 그래예. 내 촌에서 올라온 촌놈입니더. how young was i
when i realized those jokes had teeth? next time we talk, she’s carving away at
parts of her speech.
& write korean. ㅅ and ㅆ litter our tongues as i struggle to teach the difference.
ㅆ as in sex, ㅅ as in stutter. we laugh over the irony of soft not being soft &
climb into bed, the most intuitive belonging i know. our molars mark each other’s
bodies with ㄱs and ㄴs throughout the night.
—왜 한 살 더 먹기 싫은데?
she ate more 전 than 떡국 that year, except we called it 지짐, another word his
mouth never learned to house. snippets seared into my memory: the way she told
us to go home when we gathered for her birthday. the way she admitted every
year to be less traversable. i still wrestle with the fact that i am what she loves & i
keep changing & she has to watch the most prominent parts of me blur past her.
identity lost to the wind. being old must be miserable, i utter with her still in the
room, violence masked in a language she can still read off my pupils’ flitter. being
a child came with gifts, an excusable ignorance. she says are you going to marry
my 손녀 loudly through my earbuds & he copies her 경상도 accent & we all
become babies mirroring each other before we remember to swallow again.
—응, 여기도 눈 와. 근데 완전 살눈이야.
in a season she doesn’t know exists, the ice keeps hitting my face as much as i
miss her: 선나 곱재기만큼, persistently. she prays for me every single day, no
matter how many windows are between us. she used to be the only one who
would spell words wrong when we texted but now i follow suit: every day a new
page in the book of the forgotten. every day a new excuse to not go see her in the
summer.
beside a palm tree. out of eyes, out of mind. out of data—stupid phone plan. i
invent our own idioms & he laughs like they’re the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
it’s true what they say about love not being transcribable. you’ll love me beyond
language, right? we’ll fill the gaps in as we go.
—우리 그냥 같이 살면 안 돼?
do you ever wince at the sound of words leaving your own mouth? my ㅆ-less
name kept mutilating at the edge of her lips the day i told her to learn how to
speak proper korean first. the day she asked me to teach her english & i told her
the longest words i knew. she wrote them down in a notebook. today, they stay
flattened between pages like a bitten tongue.
of the heart just to frankenstein them up. people have taken too many protractors
to my grandmother’s mouth. in english, that would be start, as in saying goodbye
gave me a start. people really say those things! do you understand? do you?
(he looks up from his phone & nods & i know this means he loves me. as for the
untranslatable parts, all we can do is keep trying.)
Sal Kang is a professional sluggard and occasional writer who spends most of their free time sleeping and reading Anne Carson. Their work has been published in Vagabond City Lit, Yes Poetry, and Lunch Ticket, among others.You can find them tweeting at @nini_kang.