Creation Myth

I rushed, half-formed, from the

Pulsing warmth of my mother’s womb.

Blood surging through networks of thin red and blue

New.

They locked me in glass, to keep me from going back.

My mother, her body shut, came to inspect my progress.

“She looks like me,” finger pointing at quivering pink.

“Just like me.”

My eyes are closed.

I open them.

I am locked in an ondol room.

My parents are on the other side.

I am lost in an airport,

Black turtleneck vanished in a sea of tight brown faces.

I am drowning in a motel swimming pool groping for my brother’s hand.

I am hearing footsteps on the other side of the apartment door.

My parents are at work.

We don’t have a green card.

I am moving quickly from house to house to school to school to The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn over and over and

I am trapped in stale-smelling high school cafeterias.

I am in front of my art class, perfect specimen of the typical Oriental face

Ah so that’s so

I am willing the chairs to move and nothing is happening.

I am dreaming of nooses, knives, and the clean severing of things, I am

Opening my eyes

I scream.

The doctor says, “She will live.”


© Jane Park