Songs Without Papers

The birds came back. Or maybe they never left. Maybe I was the one who disappeared, who learned to forget the songs my first mother hummed before the agency took me across the ocean in a bassinet labeled with someone else's name.

In that hour when night breaks its own neck to become morning, when the sky bleeds light the color of hanbok silk I've only seen in photographs—you hear them. These small-bodied priests of dawn, their throats opening like the Korean words I lost before I learned to miss them.

You left the retreat. You left the walls that held your becoming like the adoption papers that held your new life—thin, legal, insufficient. But here, in the house where you first learned English, where your white mother's voice still echoes asking if you're hungry in the only language you know how to be hungry in—here the same chorus rises.

What does this mean? That home was never the country that gave you away, never the suburb that raised you to be grateful, never even the face in the mirror that looks like no one you've ever called family.

Home is this: the muscle memory of listening. The way your ear bends toward beauty even when beauty arrives wearing the face of a sparrow—unremarkable, small enough to fit in the palm of a woman who might have been your grandmother, who might have sung to birds like these in a language your mouth has forgotten how to shape.

The video camera shakes in your hands. Everything blurs—the fence, the sky, the precise moment when what you've lost meets what you've found. This is how belonging actually looks: not the sharp before and after the social workers promised, but the soft dissolving of what you thought home meant into what you're still learning it could mean.

The birds keep singing in frequencies your body remembers.

Your Korean bones keep listening through American skin.

In this simple act—ear pressed to the world's mouth—you remember: everywhere you've ever been was practice for learning that some songs cross borders without papers, without permission. That wait beyond language.

Even now. Even here. Even you.

Maps to Nowhere

Today I held the hanji paper to the light and saw myself—
translucent. Permeable.

The tea water moves across its surface like
memory, like the Han River
I've never seen but somehow know
flows through my veins. Each stain
a story interrupted. Each mark
a word I cannot pronounce
in the language that should have been
my mother tongue.

The scratches tell of hands that carved and clawed—
perhaps mine, perhaps hers,
the woman whose face I wear
in fragments. Every line intersects
with another, creating maps
to nowhere, to everywhere
but home.

Where is home when your birth certificate
is a fiction? When your name
was chosen by strangers who loved you
enough to erase you?

The salt tears, always
the salt tears, pooling where ancestry
should flow clean. What ritual
could cleanse this particular kind
of grief—the mourning of a life
unlived, a language unlearned,
a country that expelled you
before you could breathe its air?

I trace the stains with my finger and wonder:
Do the ghosts of the never-was
gather in these spaces? The grandmother
who never held me, the lullabies
unsung, the festivals
uncelebrated.

Maybe healing isn't about washing away
but about honoring what remains—
these beautiful disruptions,
these scars that prove I was here,
that something happened,
that love and loss can coexist
in the same breath.

The water dries but the marks remain.
Testimony.
Witness.
Proof of survival.

What the Tide Breaks

I arrange the broken shells, searching
for their other halves.
Severed from the same body, they glisten with insides exposed—smooth nacre against rough, weathered exteriors.

Like me, split between two worlds.

The shells hold secrets
in their iridescent chambers, just as I carry stories
I'll never know.
My fingers trace their edges, feeling for the break
that separated them from wholeness.

Mother, are you also searching tide pools for missing pieces? Do you run your thumb along photographs, wondering about the weight of my absence?

These shells teach me that even broken things can catch light, that beauty lives in the spaces between what was and what remains.

Ghost-Flowers on Colonial Grids

Looking at these haunting grid-mapped fragments, I see myself scattered across territories I've never known. Each square holds a piece of what was severed—lotus petals pressed between the pages of an adoption file, their milk-white innocence now grey with bureaucratic fingerprints.

Mother, I call to the void where your voice should have been. These colonial grids overlay my skin like scars, each intersection marking another moment of erasure. The maps fragment not just geography but genealogy, turning bloodlines into border crossings that require documentation I'll never possess.

In the second image, I trace the ghost-flowers with trembling fingers. Are these the blossoms you saw the morning they took me? Did you press them into my blanket, hoping their essence would survive the ocean between us? The tentacles of hair—yours or mine—gather in dark pools across the frame, ancestral DNA floating like kelp in unfamiliar waters.

I am the unforgotten child who learned to forget herself. Cleansed with salt tears and baptized in English syllables that never fit quite right on my Korean tongue. The pale white resemblance stares back from mirrors in suburban homes, a broken shell attempting to piece together a whole from fragments of two worlds.

These gridded kisses of colonial maps become love letters written in a language of separation. Each square contains multitudes—what was, what could have been, what remains. I rise upon these terrains, foreign to my own reflection, carrying the weight of lotus blossoms that bloom eternal in the space between memory and longing.

Mother-of-Pearl

What I know of absence
I learned from these shells—

how the body, once gone,
leaves behind its most honest architecture.

Mother-of-pearl throat
singing without breath,

each curve a year
the ocean counted in salt.

See how the empty becomes
more precious than the filled?

The soft flesh we swallowed
in one slick gulp, forgotten,

while the house it built
gleams like captured moonlight

on a white plate, eternal
as the ache in my chest

when I think of you
three thousand miles away,

your laughter an echo
in the shell of my ear.

Jeong - this untranslatable sorrow that makes beauty of
what's left behind.

The oyster's last gift:
teaching us how to treasure

the shape of what we've lost,
how absence can be

more luminous
than presence ever was.

In Korean, we say han - the deep wound

that becomes its own
strange comfort.

Here, in my palm:
even emptiness
can hold light.

inventory of water

mother, i paint myself in two minutes flat—
black ink bleeding into hanji the way
ducks disappear into lake water, counting
shellfish or prayers, who can say?

the artist residency window frames
a forest that could be seoul, could be
sài gòn, could be anywhere we've learned
to carry our dead. clouds gather

like ancestors over my bowl of rice,
kimchi breathing its fermented history.
i wonder if the ducks know they're holy,
diving for thirty seconds, forty, more—

lungs burning the way mine do
reaching for your ghost. the skylight opens
above my meal like an eye, like god
watching me eat my inheritance:

salt, time, the recycled moisture
of every woman who stirred the pot
before me. in the painting, my face
dissolves—not disappearing, but becoming

water, becoming the space between
what is living and what is merely
a shell. mother, when i surface,
i am both the duck and the counting.

Self-Portrait as Leaf Pressed Between Two Countries

Today I found myself tracing the outline of leaves on this old cloth, each mark a question I cannot ask in the language that birthed me. The fabric holds these drawings the way my body holds its first country—loosely, tenderly, as if afraid too much pressure might cause everything to disappear.

엄마. The word feels like stones in my mouth, smooth from being turned over and over but never spoken aloud. I sketch another leaf, its veins mapping pathways I will never walk, leading to a grandmother whose face I construct from the negative space between what I know and what I've lost.

The adoptive mother who raised me taught me to press flowers between book pages, to preserve beauty by flattening it into something manageable. But these drawings refuse such containment. They blur at the edges, the way memory blurs when you've been taught to call forgetting "moving forward."

My hand moves across the fabric without instruction, following some genetic wisdom that survived the severing. Each botanical form becomes a letter in an alphabet I'm slowly remembering—not Korean, not English, but something more elemental. The language of roots seeking water, of seeds finding soil in the most unlikely places.

Sometimes I think about the woman who carried me for nine months, wonder if she ever pressed her palm against her belly and felt these same hands moving restlessly, already reaching for something just beyond grasp. Did she know I would spend my life trying to sketch my way back to her?

The cloth beneath my fingers is soft with age, worn thin by countless washings. Like identity itself—fragile, persistent, holding its shape even as it transforms. Tonight I will sleep beneath these drawings, let them press into my skin like temporary tattoos, marking me with the flowers of a country that exists now only in the space between my heartbeats.

Tracks in the Borrowed Country

I found them today—tracks pressed into earth like questions I've been asking my whole life. Four pads, claws extended, searching. The matted grass holds the shape of something that passed through, something wild that knew where it was going. I kneel beside these impressions, my fingers tracing the edges where fur still clings to mud.

Long strands decay fly away, transcending to whispers of the afterlife.

These tracks could be mine. Could be eomma's. Could be the path between Seoul and this borrowed country where I learned to speak in a tongue that never quite fit my mouth. The animal that made these—did it look back? Did it wonder about the cubs it left behind?

My utterances reflect not knowing my kin's name.

I follow the trail until it disappears into forest, into the unknowing. Somewhere, footprints lead home. Somewhere, a mother's scent still lingers on wind I'll never breathe.

Will they recognize my face? Who will claim me.

Telophase

In the archive, soldiers walk the spine
of a country pulled apart. Y-posts rise
like wishbones planted upside down,
luck buried deep in frozen ground.
My grandmother says: we last spoke
in 1950. Now I wake wondering
if she wakes at all. Forty years
of mornings I can't imagine—
does she still braid her hair left to right?
Between them, these forked prayers stand—
each post a mother's clavicle
snapped, waiting for sons
to pull from either side.
January's hand redraws the fence
in ink: a thousand chances
to break toward each other,
a thousand ways to name
this distance home.

When I Learned to Make Myself Permanent

January without snow—
only the half-shell you sent,
its throat still tasting
of salt and distance.

In bare branches,
a squirrel's nest empties.
But here: your hair
burnished into permanence,
each strand pressed into paper
like a prayer made visible.

The world empties
of everything but this: your self,
transformed and held.

Brief Gospel of What Holds

Stone remembers the green fever of vines,
how they wrote promises across its skin
in cursive chlorophyll. Now brittle alphabets
spell only departure. The rock holds
its gray silence like a mother tongue
forgotten, while autumn's amber testimony
settles around what remains: this binding
that outlasts the life that made it.

The Architecture of Almost Home

In the photograph of winter's skeleton, branches weave themselves into prayer— each curve a question mark asking the sky: why can't I?

Mother, your hair falls like ink across hanji paper, cyclones of memory I cannot gather back into the warmth of your first embrace.

The branches know something about growing toward each other, about making doorways from empty space. I study their architecture, these natural arches that lead nowhere and everywhere—

Why can't I create a portal to a home?

In Seoul, grandmother's hands moved like these scattered strands, soft and comforting as clouds, weaving stories I've forgotten in a language that lives only in the hollow of my throat now.

The wind carries what we've lost. The trees catch what remains. Between their fingers, I am still learning to hold myself like someone worth coming home to.

Threshold, with Dog

The dog pulls me through brittle grass,
each stem a memory breaking
beneath our weight. Winter refuses snow—
the earth naked, honest in its dying.

From this hill, the city spreads
like my mother's hands opening
a map she cannot read. Okja,
she named me. A country
I've never seen, carried in two syllables.

The dog sniffs at emptiness,
at spaces where rabbits slept.
I am walking the border
between what was promised
and what remains. Below us,
lights flicker on—each window
a star we cannot touch.

In this snowless season, I practice forgetting: how to
say home in a language that fits my mouth. The dried
stalks whisper their brown music, and I translate: you
belong to the wind now, to the distance between your
name and its country.

The dog turns back, questioning.
I have no answer, only
this leash connecting us
to the world's unraveling,
to winter's refusal
to be beautiful, to be anything
but what it is: a season
waiting for permission to end.

Telemachus in Yellow

Your hair pressed
into yellow paper—
all I have
of the womb
I lived in.

Three days:
I counted
your breaths,
memorized the arch
of your thumb.

Now these black threads
float like questions
never asked—

each strand a road
back to you,
a country
I cannot enter.

In dreams,
I braid them
into umbilical cords,
practice
the Korean words
for "mother"
you never taught
my tongue.

Brief History of Touching

My fingers pressed lilies into rice paper—
each petal a door I cannot enter.
Graphite clouds bloom where memory burns,
watercolor bleeding pink as birth.
I trace your absence in these transfers,
fingertips finding the same swirls
you danced through: vertical pulls
toward heaven or earth, I cannot tell.
What remains translucent holds the most light.
Even ghosts need bodies
to remember touching.

Apology to the Boy I Replaced

I stopped driving north the year I understood their silence was a language too. My adoptive father still calls his cousin, explains my absence with careful words: busy, work, you know.

They wanted a son. The adoption papers
say so in black ink, permanent
as the disappointment in their eyes
when I arrived: all wrong angles,
a girl in the outline
they'd already drawn.

In the family photos I've stopped appearing in,
there's a ghost-space—
not where I was, but where
their imagined son would stand,
broad-shouldered, carrying the name
forward like a torch.

I learned to love myself in the spaces between their words: She's doing well (but not married) Smart girl (but not a son) We're proud (but)

The tree rings in that stump
keep growing without witness.
The ceramic tiles collect dust
in houses I'll never see again.
Distance is also a kind of love—
the love that says: I choose
my own survival
over your comfort.

Some daughters are born.
Some are chosen.
Some choose themselves,
finally, after years
of trying to transform
into the son
who was supposed to arrive
that day the papers were signed,
the day I came instead:
unexpected gift
in the wrong wrapping.

How to Draw Your Mother's Lungs from Memory

Han River breathes through winter's ribs—
each branch a bronchiole reaching
for what the body knows of cold.

Mother, your heart sketched in charcoal
still beats in my chest like bare trees
mapping the lung-space between us.

January burns its burnished imprint
on paper thin as skin. I trace
the anatomy of missing you:

how sorrow flows like black ink,
how memory pools in the chambers
of this season's hollow chest.

Even now, the river moves
through leafless arteries, carrying
your voice downstream to spring.

Soft Hammer

Look how the moss threads
its soft spine through asphalt—
each emerald knuckle rising
where the road forgot to seal itself.

In the lot where rain pools,
oil spreads its peacock sheen,
a dark mirror holding
every color it was never meant to be.

I've learned to love
what grows in cracks:
the stubborn green fist,
the tender rebellion of roots
splitting what seemed permanent.

Even this slick of oil
becomes cathedral glass,
teaching light
to bend, to play,
to make holiness
from what was spilled.

We are all
breaking through something.

그리움 in Salt Water

Some new years are for longing
for connection to grow with. But it is there. Inside.

Like the eel that learned to breathe
both water and waiting—
its body a question mark
pressed against the shore's answer.

In Korean, 그리움 means longing,
but also the space between
what was and what might be.
The same space where this creature
curves its spine into memory,
into the shape of returning.

새해 복 많이 받으세요, Mother said
each January, her words floating
like salt in the kitchen air.
But I was already the eel,
already learning to live
in two worlds at once—

the concrete certainty of land,
the fluid possibility of sea.

Watch how it moves:
not swimming, not crawling,
but something between—
the way I speak English
with my tongue still tasting
한국어 in its corners.

This is what connection looks like:
not the straight line
from heart to heart,
but the serpentine truth
of belonging nowhere
and everywhere,
the body itself
a bridge between
tide and shore,
year and year,
self and self.

The eel knows what I am learning:
some hungers can only be fed
by becoming amphibious,
by letting the salt water
and fresh water
meet in the same mouth,
the same prayer.

How to Teach a Wound to Sing

What does it mean to be a crack in someone else's foundation? This concrete knows—each scratch a small migration, each stain a severed root. I trace the fractures with my finger and think: we are not statistics but survived storms. Not metaphors but breath made visible. The surface breaks but does not disappear. We Korean adoptees—scattered seeds finding soil in foreign ground. Our multiplicity is not flattening but flowering. Connection doesn't erase the wound. It teaches the wound to sing.