mother tongue
WRITTEN BY ARDEN YUM
How twisted is it
to reduce language into a string
of sounds I don’t understand. To attach melody to conversation, playing in an elevator. Going up. My feet off the floor because even gravity forgets itself. A mother tongue that
isn’t much of a mother if she doesn’t teach
her child how to speak. Korean words scorch my slow tongue, my mouth red & blue
from the cold winter. My own body
rejecting language, the connective tissue
of its history. My ancestors weeping in the ground. I can’t tell if it’s a blessing that we can only feel each other through the water that seeps out of our narrow eyes. Me, a fraud on the concrete steps of Busan. Yellow skin tainting the pastel sea of paper umbrellas shielding porcelain complexions from sunburn. The white dust of a snowglobe pouring out onto the pavement. The sky sinking into the river. My grandmother once asked me why I was so dark and I said I had been swallowed
by a shadow. The sun drenched me
in light & I felt like a stake
of wood in the fire, growing warmer, browner until there was ash, floating & then falling
down.
Arden Yum is a high school senior living in New York City. She has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing and YoungArts, and her writing has appeared in Polyphony Lit and The Apprentice Writer, among others.