HELENA CHUNG
EXPERIENCE
Long car rides in the Acura playing Pokémon
were my vacations. As a child, I ran hot,
always sweating through my Life is Good
t-shirt into the porous black leather, sweating
into the A/B buttons and directional pad
of my GameBoy Color. If my mom nagged me
for wiping my palms on the back of her headrest,
I didn’t care. Too busy training my rats, foxes,
and rat-foxes. Even before I understood stats,
boxes, friendship, I loved to beat the computers:
the bug catchers, the black belts. If I lost, I’d kick
my piano books, Korean school binder, my smelly
taekwondo bag carefully packed by my feet and mom
would make me turn it off and said it’s just a game.
I worked my first pet the hardest, I dragged it
into the tall grass and commanded it to kill
every day. The 8-bit arpeggios of triumph meant
I would be kind to my pile of rocks, my fish, my plant
with a mouth. I took the winners to the hospital.
I restored their health to green. I kept them close to me.
That was when any ride longer than to the grocery
was long. Experience was hard to say, but I knew it
meant stronger. It was time to save
when the green blurs in my periphery turned
back into trees. I kept my monsters waiting
in a dark sleep, as I played the piano or swam.
My mom paced somewhere I couldn’t hear or see.
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*** ** ***
LIKE WHAT
to Hazel (age 7)
Take the shape
of my fist
heart-like.
Hard to trace
though it seems
pretty easy,
right? Smaller
bone hand
masked by a hollow
flesh hand—I know,
I’ve said that before—
my point is nothing
is exactly the same,
not when computers
say so, not photos.
It’s like
how film,
once projected,
is damaged
by the strength
of the light we use
to see it. Someday,
this picture of us,
your puffy little face,
may be lost to everyone.
It’s like missing something
still alive, like that,
like this, here. See,
on your paper a jumble
of red, hard to follow
where it starts
and ends. And on my hand
strokes here and there,
waiting to smudge
whatever I hold,
wherever I rest.
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*** ** ***
VITAL FLUIDS
Can you believe a nest is mostly sticks
and spit? The only thing between an egg
alone with no one knowing that it’s there,
and me alone, in early morning, crying
and calling my mom because I don’t know what
to do, is chewed up twigs. My spit
so rarely leaves my mouth. Expressive as
it is—distaste or pleasure, illness, and
yeah, for birds, a kind of care or love—
my spit will stay with me. I cannot help
but feel protective of my DNA.
After having seen so much monstrosity
birthed from loose strands of hair or fingernails.
Like in Jurassic Park, the whole attraction
made from drops of blood they found inside
a bug inside a stone. If we die out,
I think it’s better we stay dead. I’d hate
if it were my dumb cells the future beasts
of earth brought back to life. I cannot bear
to think how poorly they’d reflect our race.
So scared to do even the smallest things
like pick up phones, say what they mean, bury
broken eggs. They’d watch my clone from behind
a one-way glass, and take their little notes:
more tears again today for days and days.
We do not even know what makes her cry.
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*** ** ***
A WAY OF LIFE
My robot brother asks me to help
him pour his milk into his cereal
every morning. Every morning,
we hold the carton together and spill
a little on the Corian countertops.
When he asks me to carry his
backpack as he ties his shoe, I put
both straps on one of my shoulders
because it is so small. I walk him
to the school bus stop and he asks
me what it means, says his baseball
coach told him it’s not just a game,
it’s a way of life. He loves the activity,
the thick bats, the grass brushing the soft
skin of his ankles on the way to the field.
He tells me about it every day, replays
for me his favorite parts from his memory
bank. We giggle about the wild things
his sapien teammates do as his stained
clothes run in the wash. How could I
say it means a way to be more human?
I pat his hair that will never grow.
Tell him, it just means to keep at it,
something good is coming soon.
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*** ** ***
MUSICA RECTA
The Germans call it H, to us, B natural,
that whole tone below C. How we started
to call it that is unclear. It’s hard to decipher
the old scores, where the ink stops and starts.
Some people say it was simply the next letter
and had to follow. It’s how I sign my emails,
the initial my friends now call me by; my
sisters bear it too in English, our common
voiceless glottal fricative. H from the Greek
beauty, H from Eminem’s daughter, H
from a girl in a YA novel. This is how mom
named us, our other names decided
by someone I’ll never meet. Our dad’s dad faxed
him a brief list of lucky options the day after
we each were born. In order: Forest of Orchids,
Protector of Beauty, Beauty itself. All based
on date and time of birth. Eighth month, eight
strokes in Forest, eight strokes of ink in Beauty.
I still cannot remember how to write it
in the traditional Chinese it comes from. It’s the last
scale I learned to play: all those accidentals. If I went
too fast I hit the nodes above the strings and made
a dead sound—so often that finally Riley said, if your hand
can’t get there in time just hit the edge of the bar. The synthetic
wood resonating under the green tufts of mallet.
I stayed after school a lot to practice even when I got
better. I ate from vending machines and listened
to the boys try to play pop songs by ear: Somebody
that I Used to Know, Call Me Maybe. I learned it then,
the boys translating music to letters on their vibraphones:
the ominous chromatic of BAH, FAB echoing down
the hall where the guard girls practiced choreo,
the strange addition in ACHE—that minor chord cut open.
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*** ** ***
OR SO I THINK
Just on my walk home, the world
becomes a dim pink. The shadows alert
and crisp as a sheath of tinfoil. Pearls
slip from the chin to the tight shirt
of a runner bent over his shoe, some
rock playing in his ears—that nagging hurt,
the kind one chooses. Crumbs
of light from someone’s watch dust
my vision and because I ask, they become
a hum, a lyric, a dark mirror I must trust.
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*** ** ***
ELEGY, YEARS LATER
for Katrina Roberts
Today you must be grateful for many things,
the cherry blossoms reprimand me.
April is a season of losing. Every spring
I spend brining in mucus, tears. I cling
to what I can salvage, remember, and see.
Today, I am grateful it is so many things:
a bracelet of marimba cord, the nose ring
you wanted, the fence we hopped with glee
in April that season we lost so often. Spring
taunting us from outside rehearsal, puking
happiness over our adolescence. We agreed,
today and every day, it’s just one thing
after another. Only me, thinking we were waiting
for some future where the world was less ugly.
That April, even the season lost its spring,
its mechanical joy. Rain fell like a string
had just been cut to let it loose. Beauty?
Today? Ungratefully, I see it in many things
in April, a whole season of losing in spring.
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HELENA CHUNG
Helena Chung is a Korean American poet currently residing in Washington, DC. Helena’s poems have appeared in Pleiades, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, The Journal, and elsewhere.
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A Dozen Nothing 