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.
Okja Kwon (b. 1981) is a Korean-born, transracial adoptee artist
who communicates through intimate illustrative image-making.
In response to one's survivalist attempts to transcend an identity historically rooted in imperialism, global capitalism, and desirability, Kwon draws upon metaphors that take ritualistic form. The enactment of "witnessing" provides a compilation of whispered ideations and fragmented (re)imagined remembrances of in-betweenness, all in an attempt to build an intuitive and otherworldly bridge to transcend blurred relations.
