Seoul Haibun
Winner – COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards, Poetry
Isabella Cho
i asked for home in this city, sold my tongue to the fisherman un-teething pollock in the lip of the monsoon. bad weather, he said, brandishing his knife slick with red film, bad weather to sell the sea. i asked for home and was given meat wrapped in cellophane, the muscle-thrash of fin still warm in my palms. the man said eat, slipped the ocean’s welled tear in my throat.
*
there is no repentance here. instead, my tongue welling with blood, culled of syllable. back home in america telephone pole cordons my teeth, makes meat of my hands. back home there is hamburger grease on my chin and the denim makes it hard to breathe. back home i cannot hear my grandmother —when you coming back?— over the lawnmower sliding its teeth over pansies, over the picketed lawn, the violence of it. but not here. here i watch boys pocket dragonflies in their mouths and say aya aya aya as asphalt peels their knees. here i steal glances at the girls scrawling pictographs over their pale arms — moon, daughter, hunger hunger — under camphor, catch their immaculate pronunciation and let it add skins to my mouth.
*
my mother told me i used to run open-mouthed through these parks. at night she read me stories, traced her hands over symbol-studded pages, watched as my tongue moved worlds: there is a rabbit on the moon. i’d clamber over steel jungle gym, claw at the blue air. i want that rabbit i want that rabbit i want that want that that. back then, i hadn’t learned to economize want. back then, the buildings were so close they felt like skins made of turning walls. back then, there was a way to salvage what i’d lost in the fish bones xylophoned through my lips smeared in cheap gloss. back then, there were words for the person i wanted to be: powerful, intimidating. well-spoken, ambidextrous. two-tongued. two-tongued. two-tongued.
*
at the lakefront, the city bristles before turning away. my tongue lodges against the slums of my teeth: a foreign root. esophagus darkens with spit and i cack. the muscle slips, blue and wild, onto my palms, stirs like child like dog like rainwater maddened by teeth, moves as if mouthing hymnal. and the fisherman knee-deep in black water mistakes my posture for praying. and i blister animal under the moon. and i beg for home and this, this is what is left to be given: the city turning its back, souls collected in its limbs like a forest. and my tongue shifts in my hands, looks into my eyes as if to say chase
me as if to say you
never owned me as if to say goodbye
now as if to say gone gone.
Post-War Topography
Isabella Cho
these are the mountains, i’m told,
where boys with guns weaved through trees
and prayed for rain. where camphor caught red
silt between roots and the spirits of tigers stirred
in faceless boughs, silver bombers gliding
through canopy. at night, the mountains grow
like stains, lean into the automobiles strewn
over asphalt. in the sky, a commercial plane,
red wound on a pockmarked face. gravel rasps under
my rubber soles. i paw at it: an animal, maw wet
with what’s to come. there’s no truck hulking bovine
in the dark, no moonlit wheel to throw
my gaze at. instead, my hands, oiled from heat,
rushing down for dust: an arc of rubble thrown
into sky. it suspends, luminous, then clatters
to stillness. eight years ago i would’ve believed
that the mist pouring from the mountain’s jaw
was my grandmother. now, just pearl air killing
the blue rhythm of stars. crickets weep
and add a skin to silence. above mountains
light cycles through its blistering histories—
i, too, a fist of dust in transit.
Poet’s Statement
This past summer, I reflected a lot about what role structure -- or a lack thereof -- plays in poetry. Having recently visited my family in South Korea, I thought a lot about the idea of distance in its physical, geographical, and emotional forms, of how distance informs the ways in which we construct narratives and relate to both others and ourselves. Though I gravitate more toward free verse, I thought that the organizational restrictions of a haibun would help me make sense of distance: economize it, orient my voice within it, and discover its potential. I think that’s a really interesting revelation I encountered when experimenting with form: Though we view form as an inherently constricting and rigid entity, it often serves the opposite purpose, encouraging us to approach our text and our material in novel, exciting, and challenging ways. “Seoul Haibun” emerged from this impulse to exploit structure as a means of charting unorthodox pathways to self-discovery.
Judge Emily Skillings on “Seoul Haibun”
This poet engages the innate formal striations of the Haibun form and brings to it their own texture of memory, loss, and belonging. A few nights before encountering this memorable text I had been reading Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, those quintessentially "modern" prose poems that continue to shock us into a new understanding of being and seeing. Tuned towards the possibilities and exciting limits of poetic prose, I was struck by this poet's understanding of timing, texture, and intonation. The poem felt almost like a musical score! Reading "Seoul Haibun," I was compelled by both the beauty, specificity, and strangeness of the language, as well as the palpable longing of a speaker negotiating identity and loss. In this poem, acts of speech and remembering, place, and migration find their place in the body. I could see this developing into a powerful series, and hope to see more of this poet's work in the future."
– Emily Skillings, 2020 Poetry Judge
about the writer
Isabella “Izzy” Cho is a student and writer from Wilmette, Illinois. She is the recipient of the 2020 Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, and her work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Princeton University, the Sejong Cultural Society, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, among others. Some of Izzy’s favorite things include cafes, fancy soaps, and Korean dramas. She will attend Harvard University in the fall.