To My Sister
Noona, sister, wake up, it’s so early this morning, look how I got too caught up in my own shit to get to sleep. I had that dream again, where all your friends were there and we made our way home. Now we awake, and now we are home, Buffalo Grove, Illinois, 2011, timestamp the letters and internet IM’s sailing across the flat midwest. Our house overlooks a major local highway, and all I see are white walls and green and coyotes, snow and the orthogonal road. I wish I could run away, but I know you’ll always love me, you tell me don’t, please, stay here. I sleep upstairs, and downstairs, you seem, to me, as unhappy as ever that I have decided to remain, shouting at our father, and our mother shuts the new white cabinets and hits my hands and tells me to stop my own complaints.
When I’m 19 years old, one day we’re in your apartment with the shades half-drawn, and you tell me that I shouldn’t call you noona anymore, it’s awkward, because we’re usually amongst her friends, they call her Ella, we’re not children anymore, we have our own names. You’re frowning, and I look out towards the train station, and it’s almost raining on those suitcases and umbrellas and jackets. When I’m on a walk later, a tiny bay unfurls beside me, Mission Bay, and last year, I passed San Francisco commuting to dates and sex at Berkeley from across the bay at Stanford time after time, but that hasn’t really been happening lately, well, so I avert my stride on a quick one and go back to your building and forget about it. It’s almost your 25th birthday, and your shoe rack tells me that your five additional years of age are hard won, but you triumph continually, school career and money, and when you ask me which photograph print should be hung up in your bedroom, I swipe through options and pick a rather tall and narrow picture, the haziest one with silhouettes and shadows and big splotches of colored lights, red and yellow, so you can just barely make out a protest slash riot, because I never want you to forget that life has only triumphed for a handspan’s width of time, maybe as thick as my thumb, and you never want me to forget the same thing. But the truth is, I’m busy carrying on in the complete un-empathy of blissful release, even more selfish than what these songs would have you believe: because it’s a pandemic, but I’m still endangering our family by sneaking out to have sex with queer strangers without masks in the cold hours of the night or morning while living in your apartment that summer. When I feel ill one day, I tell you the omitted truth, and you and your boyfriend are scared, angry, tearful, worried for our safety. We sleep and wait, hoping to test negative for the virus.
I keep breaking dad’s watches. Our parents still live in the same house we grew up in. He puts them each in my hand, a central quarterly fiscal event, and says that this one works fine, he’s worn it for a year, take care of it. I have squandered the second hand ticks and all the books I’ve bought that I know I’ll never read, I’ve probably read as many books as I’ve broken timepieces and told our father that the watches seem fragile, as he notes that I’m the only one breaking them. A year ago and you’re telling me that poetry doesn’t resonate with you, and I rush to think there must be some poem I must write, hearing those words, just those.
When I enter the afterlife, I’m a sophomore, it’s 2019, and I have never remembered the date. Mallory is the friend, a quasi-sibling, she grabs me outside her lab building after I call her and walk over and tell her that I fell from the ceiling as my belt broke in half. It’s dark, and I am transparent and the slim fabric next to the jacket zipper cauterizes some leftover chest pain as the forearm bones wrap around and beg me not to leave. She cries, but I can’t, and I think about how there’s someone out there asking where all the ducks in Central Park go in the winter.
While assembling friends, Mallory calls you. Your eyes look at me through swollen lids. Your boyfriend drove you all the way from SF to Stanford, it’s far to Palo Alto, and I wish that you didn’t have to go to all that trouble to witness my arrival into the afterlife. My freshman-year best friend Nate drives me to hospital. I enter with only one other person, so you come, and I decide to sleep in the emergency room for a while.
You and your boyfriend come to see me every day in the San Jose behavioral hospital. I almost would rather you didn’t, but visiting time is the only non-monotony, and I think standing here, in this concrete-laden courtyard, surrounded by all the reinforced glass windows and a psychiatrist explaining the new drug to your pursed lips, feels better but I suspect that this is wasting your time, that all our time can’t be given back, even if I want to make it up later, the time and place matters, like train track lights and sleep.
Once, I am almost ejected from Stanford campus because I represent a potential threat to myself, the residence dean tells me so from across a desk, I want to file down the wooden corners of his office and vandalize the walls in orange or warm blue. Noona makes her way to campus again, and we convene and throw our voices at each other about studying and schoolwork. I tell her I haven’t done shit this year, fuck, I haven’t done shit for the past few years, and if I don’t get shit done now, it doesn’t feel so different to me. Once, I stopped calling my sister that childhood Korean term for older sister, and ever since, it’s been easy to want to keep fighting, to preserve our childhood quibbles. I don’t like how things change, and I can’t figure out why I throw myself at breakneck speed at every potentiality, when I find myself missing every past, too, yearning for other lives, because I always compare the tragedies of midwest souls, each pair always somehow bound together. We are 5 and 10 years old, and Ella and I throw game controllers at each other in the car parked by the dry powdered ground, somewhere traveling far, never knowing where we were going, never needing to know anything at all.
Place-Poem, Quasi-Sestina
after “Step” by Vampire Weekend
I once wrote a sestina in the peninsula, near San Francisco,
to talk about impermanence and teenage relationships. The city wasn’t Berkeley,
but it, too, was an ancient grave one digs up over again, near Palo Alto,
on a day when it was too rainy to ride that shaky bicycle up Potrero Hill
and the months when a loving hand was only offered from over in Sunnyvale —
that time I knew I was in love with an ex-girlfriend from Fremont
and Oakland seemed like a far-off memory to me. It was the lonely island Alameda
that made me think about Chicago, and then, I was suddenly there, in Hyde Park,
in the Jay Som t-shirt, in the cloud-stuck afterlife. My hometown, Buffalo Grove,
was only an hour away, and even though I hadn’t even met you yet, it was New York City
that I was missing, I was in California but it was E 180th station and the Bronx Zoo
that appeared in dreams, I’d wake up talking about a chain-link fence cast in Poughkeepsie
that told me of your future love, days after the uncaring ex-girlfriend from Oak Brook
shrugged me off her shoulder for the last time. You were the future, somehow Illinois-
bound, even though you’ve never even been there. Your spirit came to me from Rochester,
haunted songs that arrived in our lives in tandem, and your family’s native Puerto Rico
showed up at the bottom of the album cover for Red Burns, and suddenly, Seoul
appeared before me, too, and reminded me I couldn’t be old after all, it was Suwon
that was my mother’s birth-city, and somewhere off in current-day North Korea
was my father’s father’s birthplace. For my family, Chicago
feels modern. How long have I really lived? I imagine taking you to see Wicker Park
and pointing out all the uncaring hipsters I see my past selves in, and at Thalia Hall
someday you could tell me you’d rather not make out while the band from Leesburg, Virginia
played onstage. These days, we’re drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with Amsterdam
Shag tobacco, and I always wonder, what past lives did the moon dictate for you? Sagittarius
could be a place/palace in your mind, and I could guess the coordinates — Prague,
for my own topology, feels appropriate, and it’s where I think the astronomical clock tower
would make a good place for us to sit nightly and point somewhere in the sky, call it Venus.
And someday, we’d say goodnight and end up in Budapest
in the morning, train-stopped, and we’d be just a little bit older. Heading off to the Danube,
I’d wonder if we have to wait so long to feel time complete its orbit around us. Brooklyn
will have blessed us by then (Red Burns call the place Medina
because it’s holy) and when we stay up late at night on the phone, the Hudson
speaks through us, in harmony, two voices, miles apart in the same city. In Jerusalem
next year, the secrets of the psalms will stay tongue-tied, but at the corner of Kosciuszko
and Broadway, your poem will speak to me, remind me by the grace of San Jose
I’m still alive, loved by the lunar secrets you tell me you’re running out of. In Prague,
I told the Vltava I was looking for a tender heart. I confessed my love to you in Brooklyn,
watched you walk away to Kosciuszko station. You turned around and pointed to the moon.
Young Fenimore Lee (they/them) is a Korean-American kid, poet, and music journalist residing in Athens, OH whose work has appeared in DIALOGIST, Entropy, Existere, and filling Station. Indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, and other music genres are important influences in their writing. They received a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from The New School. They are currently pursuing a PhD at Ohio University.