A Bouquet of Bandaged Mouths

a corona from South Korea

by Esther Ra

It begins with the smallest of breaths:
a cough, a voice split into seven veins.
We joke with the coolness of broader
perspective, suavely side-eye our parents.
Relax, we laugh, it’s only a flu.
It is only when the numbers increase by the hundreds
and move to my country my city my street
that the laughter deflates to wrung smiles.
Our unfevered days may be numbered.
Tissues wrench from boxes like translucent ghosts,
and the shop doors are shadowy, swinging.
Fear, small as an epidemic, hatches in our stomach.
Dust, soft as butterflies, settles in the mouths of streets.

II.

Dust, soft as butterflies, settles in the mouths of streets.
We have become a city of bandaged mouths,
filled with the cold wine of panic.
Our new name is South Corona

Symptoms that a country has become synonymous with sickness:

(i) Jostling crowds seek salvation in emergency supplies
(ii) A new language translates I love you to Stay home
(iii) We swerve from touch, but our lips tremble to the same theme

Schoolgrounds are closing. Our homeland is ending.

The sky is shutting its doors.

III.

The sky is shutting its doors,
country after country, arms crossed in defense,
though our gates remain shadowy, swinging.
Airplanes doze in the sun, forgotten as broken mirrors.
A quarantine is only the skeleton of a holiday;
a country under quarantine is only
the skeleton of a country.
My mother welcomes me with a shower
of disinfectant: killer cure, spray of citrus
and teeth. Outside, the rain swallows alleys and feet,
drinking its own thirst with a vengeance.
Water spills: the sky’s only way
to make love to a banned earth,
like a broken god bending his knees.

IV.

Like a broken god bending his knees,
Lee Man-hee touches his corrugated forehead
to the floor. Despite being the Second Jesus, he
is tested for the virus. Keeps wiping his glasses,
blurred by his breath, slipping down the bridge of his nose.
I apologize, he croaks, on behalf of the sick:
over half have been touched by his cult.
Cult famous for rinsing young minds of their
money. Cult practiced in heist of the truth.
Dark mushroom of faith that bloomed underground:
police; preschool teachers; health officials.
His followers immortal, yet coughing.
A brother tastes brine in his mouth tonight,
thinking of the last memory of his sister. A mother’s
eyes flicker dully from window to window,
waiting years for her children’s return.
How many children have been drained of their color,
refurbished, burning mannequins?
At the hospital, a woman insists, I’m not
from the Shincheonji cult. Lips scissored from words,
chin jutting slightly, she keeps her eyes fixed
on the back of a doctor, dark with bouquets of sweat.

The backs of doctors are bouquets of sweat,
boulders shrugging the rank stream of rain.
Beneath their hands, patients twitch like the blink
of pupils in milky, wide-open eyes.
Here, flesh is seared from its seams by tight goggles;
astronauts carry globes of clean air.
Nurses stagger sideways on empty stomachs,
pumping life into emptier chests.
Volunteers snatch filaments of sleep from the floor,
and a son writes, Come home in the spring.
In the sickroom, a lung can be shattered to glass.
A cough becomes more than a body.
Some cry for mothers, others hurl spit,
all poor students in the lesson of breathing.

VI.

We are poor students in the lesson of breathing,
which begins with the bright crown of thanks.
Inhale was a gift of just that much life
& exhale should have taught us
how to give it back too. Yes, I know
life can feel like a graceless assault,
but to be alive is to tend to our garden of days,
make forsythia wreaths from small hours.
I admit, many days, I too have quenched
my thirst from an undiminished well
without adequate joy or amazement.
I am trying to listen to the smallest of coughs,
which could mean “We are breathing”
or “We are drowning in our bodies.
Across the ocean, we are called a disease.”

VII.

Across the ocean, a girl calls a friend a disease.
A man snaps a finger in half. He is shouting,
Get your coronavirus out of my country.

In fear, as in anger, we need someone
to blame, our disease. As if skin
itself flaring disease. As if country
the face of disease. We dis-ease.
In fear. & In anger. Do we see?
Spreading like flu or lit flames.

What would it mean for us to feel both
the friction of compassion and fear,
& choose the deep silk of compassion instead?

One country is a redwood, scraping the sky.
Another is a willow kissing the grass.

All kneel like broken gods beneath the same storm,
with no arms large enough to call home.

VIII.

Though two arms used to be enough to call home,
nothing is enough for the moth-softness of life.
For three days straight a mother has been crying alone
in her room. In a room in a house where everyone
has been breathing through masks for weeks.
The hospitals are overflowing, with nowhere to stay
but a place that had once been called home.
Coughs have been tearing her throat, each a round
of artillery fire. She is refusing to step
through the door. Mommy, mommy. Her children
crouch at the threshold, watching light shift
through the crack. Her two arms are aching to pull
them home. Head buried, she is coughing and coughing.

There was a day, she thinks [cough-cough] / God help us [cough-cough] / there was a day when love [cough] / was ours for the taking.

IX.

God help us, there was a day when love was ours for the taking,
ours for the taking for granted. We should have held each other more,
entwined fingers, soaked in embrace a little longer. We should have
driven to watch the sea kissing the bare shore all night, lingered
over the late dinner dish. My skin is hungry. My heart is
hungry. The bare, quiet bones of my city are gleaming
under the moonlight. My people are wading through loneliness,
like trees wiping cloud from their cheeks. I’ll never forget
the time I went to visit my sister, and she enveloped me
in two arms that were home. It had been so long
since I had been touched by someone my body could trust
that I stared at her, rain slipping down my cheeks.
It isn’t so hard, though we will always be poor students
in the lesson of love. It begins with a touch that you know
you can trust. It begins with stay safe in your language.
Try it: unclench your two ears, unfold your dry tongue.
It begins with the smallest of breaths.

It begins with the smallest of breaths.
Dust settles, soft as butterflies, in the mouths of streets.
The sky shuts its doors on Korea, and
a broken god falls to his knees.
The backs of doctors are bouquets of sweat.
We are poor students in the lesson of breathing.
Across the ocean, a girl calls her friend a disease,
though two arms used to be enough to call home.
There was a day–God help us–
there was a day we thought love
was ours for the taking.

Esther Ra is the author of book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018) and founding editor of The Underwater Railroad, a literary reunification project. Her work has also been published in Rattle, The Rumpus, Atlanta Review, and Border Crossing, among others, and has received awards including the Pushcart Prize and the William Wantling Prize for Poetry. Esther currently works in Seoul to support North Korean defectors. In writing, as in life, she is deeply interested in the quiet beauty of the ordinary. (estherhaelanra.com)