Hannah Seo
Poems of Estrangement
To the Taiwanese boy in my 3rd grade class
Even now I am sorry
for avoiding your eyes (I tried to be subtle), your
presence — self-preservation
demanded I protect the façade with which I had
all those little white children fooled. You were
a threat, your existence
a foil, an unwanted origin story; my perfect English
made me taller, my perfect grades forgivable, neutralized
my eye shape (your fragmented
sentences only made yours smaller). God forbid, we be
classed together — surely they see I’m domesticated,
passable, a copacetic facsimile
who can spew out vocabulary like copacetic facsimile —
a whole generation of belonging put articulation in my mouth
and ice in my eyes. Tongue bleached
(what was your name again?), ears resentful (hey, what did
he say?): how can I be your interpreter, why should you tint
my unpigmented selfscape —
the one I present with neither scent, nor taste, nor texture.
Substance
there is a two-inch gap behind my books,
a mouth stuffed with shiny aluminum
packaging – reflective ribbons that swallow
every lightness directed their
way. jonesing for a shot of self-loathing,
I distill a sip of
soured elixir for every pound of doubt: a show of
modern alchemy:
unbridled restriction.
I am both luciferous performer and staunch
disciple – I follow the doctrines
of weights and measures, meditation and tea.
no room have I for indulgences,
no budget have I for cream. in the quake
of echoes I nurse my milky bruises and
stand at the altar, oily with kitchen
grease, slick with pig fat.
woman, carbonated with indignation,
cross-eyed from introspection – I reek of
disguised terror, of decay in the name
of health, of self-
martyrdom, of maxims
that minimize and deny the silver rivers
on my thighs, the fractures
in every reflection. I stretch and
break, bend the light away, and grow
so beautifully rotten in complacency
– sugar, don’t
romantics make the best cynics.
Tiger
When I cut my arm on a friendly tongue I am surprised
it bleeds. I lick the open slit and don’t know to call a wound
a wound.
Some hunters ignore you as their steel sinks into
your skin. Others keep your gaze as their lashes darken new
stripes. Lash with a smile, lash with a wink, lash with a scowl.
A stranger opens my back with a slice. But where are the
bones? they ask, blood and bones in exchange for stones.
They thought there’d be more. They always want more.
Snarling tigers are put down.
Darling children slash at my face
and make cuts I cannot reach. Look what you’ve done, I
lament into their baby-blues, you’ve stained your blonde with
red.
I radiate out of every line, branded as far as the eye can
see. The soft of my coat seeps out and settles into hard, matted
clots.
With my teeth I craft a barbed-wire cage to keep poachers
out and away, out and away.
Out! – I stripe my body against
the barricades – out! – I band my palms and paint my belly –
out! – I stripe until I no longer know the sight of my own skin.
Safe in the hiding, I stand in plain sight – camouflage myself
against the trees and think how every vein is a history that won’t
stop its retelling.
Hannah is a Korean-Canadian young, emerging writer and student of Journalism at NYU. She spends her days writing prose with facts and straight lines, and spends her nights unraveling every rule she’s learned – collaging the fragments into poetry. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Limestone Review, Paragon Press, Open Minds Quarterly, and The Jellyfish Review, among others.