I.
Grid-mapped fragments. I see myself scattered across territories never known.
Each square holds what was severed— lotus petals pressed between pages, milk-white once, now grey with the dust of processing.
Mother.
The word falls into the void where your voice should have been.
II.
These colonial grids overlay skin. Each intersection: a marking. The maps fragment not geography alone but genealogy— bloodlines become border crossings, documentation I will never possess.
III.
In the second image, ghost-flowers. I trace them.
Were these the blossoms you saw the morning they took me?
Did you press them into the blanket, hoping essence survives ocean?
The tentacles of hair—yours, mine— gather in dark pools across the frame. Ancestral matter floating like kelp in unfamiliar waters.
IV.
The unforgotten child who learned to forget herself.
Cleansed with salt. Baptized in syllables that never fit right on a Korean tongue.
The pale resemblance stares back from suburban mirrors— broken shell attempting whole from fragments of two worlds.
V.
Gridded kisses of colonial maps become love letters 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 lotus blossoms that bloom eternal in the space between memory and longing.
What cannot cross the water crosses anyway— in petal, in tendril, in the ghost of a tongue never spoken.
