Tomorrow

(a flash fiction shortlisted at Brilliant Flash Fiction) 

Nae-il da kkeun-nat-tta,” means “Tomorrow is the end,” so I interpreted my Grandpa’s words, as he labored for breath, and believed I had one more day with him.

***

Grandpa came to live with us when I turned 16 and upturned everything. Suspicious, all English was gossiping about him. He slapped his cane on the dining table legs and demanded my brother and I speak Korean in front of him and scolded his 51-year-old son for raising such rootless and disrespectful kids. He took my room, I had to bunk with my younger brother, then took away my Saturday morning pick-up baseball games as I sat in a church and memorized Korean alphabets that felt like pebbles in my tongue.

“When your grandpa was your age,” my father once explained after another grandpa’s dinner rant, “He was forced to use his Japanese name and only speak Japanese.”

***

It was hard to see him, flat on his back, moaning and make painful something so simple as breathing. I wished he was slapping with his cane.

“Where are you going?” my father asked but I pretended not to hear him as I let the door shut behind me.

***

I walked to Ji-Yeon’s apartment, Noona , older female friend, who I wished would become my girl. She wasn’t like the other FOB, Fresh-Off-The-Boat girls, whose English was grammatically contorted. She spoke English properly, better than me, even quoted Shakespeare. She also smoked Marlboros, which won me over.

We walked out to her fire escape. She lived alone, came to do two years in Stuyvesant High, take SAT and make it to Harvard, that was the plan, her father’s, that is. Her father had enough money to support her studying abroad. “He is rich enough not to care about me,” is how she put it.

She lit a cig, took another one, lit the second one by kissing the tips together then puffed on the second one and handed it to me.

“Thanks Ji-yeon.”

Noona.” We both smiled. It was mid summer, but it rained a few hours ago, so the air was tolerably cooler and smelled of maple leaves and asphalt. A siren wailed towards some emergency.

“Did you say what we’ve been working on?”

I flicked my cig. An ember fell. A glowing red dot floated up then disappeared into the thick night as if it never existed. Smoking helped me converse because I didn’t have to talk all the time. Having something to busy my lips made silence bearable, even cool, so I said things. 

“No. ’Sorry’ is such a hard word to say in Korean.”

“English too,” She said. I heard a bus trudging in, and a crowd flowed out of it then sank into the subway stations where they will take the 7 train into Manhattan to clean buildings; the fairies that keep trash cans eternally empty.

“Shouldn’t you be home?”

“He said, ‘Nae-il da kkeun-nat-tta,” you know, ‘tomorrow I’m done.’ So melodramatic! He’ll survive until tomorrow. Everything’s as he believes.”

She squashed her cig, “Those words also mean, ‘My work is done.’”

I ran home, splashing muddy puddles, past a barking pit bull. People congregated around the lights of an ambulance circling my street. I pushed through the murmuring gathering, flew up the stairs and shoved the door open. Father and brother were wailing. Grandpa was no longer there. Just his body.

Pieta (Philando & Diamond)

pieta

charred, acrid smell of gunpowder

smokes from the holes in his body

which carries the stigma(ta) of

all things dark,

        lead from the muzzle

to the flesh, three wounds enough

to steal the soul four more

for good measure, make sure

 

out of         black         

skin            red            blood pools

soaks         white        cotton

smudges of death’s fingers,

colors by murders

 

black          red           white

red             black        white

black         black         black

 

Philando’s neck arches towards heavens

sake, taut skin exposes ridges of adam’s apple,

carrying  the sins of our people, life seeping

out from his body slipping down earth’s vinyl

 

Mary can’t hold him, she wants to cradle him

she wants to take his place, she wants

to pull him back, she wants to save

him, she wants to spare him black death,

but Mary can’t because

Mary must give witness

unable to rescue she gives witness,

the lance spearing her heart is her uselessness

 

Mary don’t weep

give witness

 

The horror, she must say sir to the murderer

 


to be born black is to be born with a cross-

hair on your back, a cross on every pound

of flesh that is black, of no matter

but only matter that weighs

on those who continue to love

 

in the Pieta,

Diamond is looking at you

while she is

                  streaming

           without

      tears

            streaming

 

 

Weep

You

Must

Give

With-

Ness

 

—–

(an edited version, which gives it a new urgent tone, was generously published by Cleaver Magazine)

About the Poem

When I first saw Diamond giving witness to the murder of her friend, Philando (7/6/2016), the first thought was how is she able to bear the horror enough to give witness, a poise that seemed both an admittance of her powerlessness and her power: powerlessness about the death of Philando but power to narrate the story.

As I tried to inscribe that image, another image was imposed on the streaming scene: the Pieta. Diamond looked to me like Mother Mary.

In the Pieta, Mary receives the lifeless body of her son with the deep intimacy of maternal love, but she doesn’t cover him. Rather, she presents to our eyes, the heavy head of Christ and his lifeless arched neck as a witness to the world’s cruelty.

The first draft of this poem came in a rush. But I’ve been returning to it ever since.

I returned to it tonight (6/16/2017), when I heard of the acquittal of the cop who shot him. In face of such blatant injustice, I see the crucifix more vividly. Though no death can ever be compared with another death, and certainly in Christian theology, no death carries the weight of redemption as Christ’s death, yet I think it is important to see this black man’s death as a sort of crucifixion.

Stigmata is a gift to the saints, like St. Francis of Assisi, people pure enough to receive the wounds of Christ. In a racial world where the black body is deemed as evil, dangerous and worthless, it is not just pertinent but clear-eyed to see the black body as pure and able to receive Christ’s body, that it is a human body to be held as sacred for carrying the divine image of Christ.

Lily

sea brings back to shore

boy bloated like closed lily

life never unfurled

 

A haiku that won haiku-of-the-times contest at Ghostwood Books.
The words came as if whispered to me by the ghost of Aylan, for the image continues to haunt me.