———
Hanji, Held to Light
Today I held honey-kissed hanji to the light.
Translucent. Permeable.
———
Tea water moves across its surface—
memory, the Han River
I have never seen
but know.
Each stain: a story interrupted.
Each mark: a word I cannot pronounce
in the tongue that should have been
first.
———
The scratches speak of hands that carved and clawed.
Perhaps mine. Perhaps hers—
the woman whose face I wear
in fragments.
Every line intersects another,
creating maps
to nowhere,
to everywhere but home.
———
Where is home when your birth certificate is fiction?
When your name was chosen by strangers
who loved you enough to erase you?
———
Salt tears. Always
the salt tears pooling
where ancestry should flow clean.
What ritual could cleanse
this particular 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.
Do the ghosts of the never-was
gather here? The grandmother
who never held me. The lullabies
unsung. The festivals
uncelebrated.
———
Perhaps healing is not washing away
but 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.
The marks remain.
Testimony.
Witness.
Proof of survival.
———
