We Built This City: A Broken Hyangga1
by Joan Kwon GlassSeolmundae Halmang (Jeju)
I built this city out of dirt& spitedescended from heaven
against my mother’s willthree seas cannot drown me
nor can they save me at night I lay my head against Hallasan
her molten rage it was love for my sons that killed me
my desperation to ease their hunger the only hurdle
I could not cross when I died they turned
to stone scattered by the wind & water & soil
the only cure for this loneliness: to marry my own rib
then to break it
Eulna (Go, Ryang & Bu) (Jeju)
Our mother’s ghost roused us from our stony prisonsstill hungry
what sort of mother drowns in juk stupid woman
why should she get the credit for creating Jeju she could not even feed us
we wrote a new narrative complete with virginstrapped
inside a jade box yes we saved the virginsyes
we married them we built this city through ascension
from three holes in the ground & now look—
our many children have built a shrine around the holes we crawled out of
Seoul/Daegu/Busan, 1981
We built this city on the American dream. The starship,
so shiny & new, we don’t care where it’s headed.
Every war is a forgotten war. We know not to ask questions.
Instead, we spend whole afternoons riding the escalators.
So determined to see how high we can go, we don’t see
the steps behind us disappearing
we don’t see the holes opening
Sampoong Department Store Collapse, 1995
I want to blame my aunt—
for her own deathher affinity for
expensive handbags—instead of war
instead of capitalismculpability is complicated
death is not& she is dead
it is lazy to claimwe built this city from
greed, truer to admitwhat we thought would keep us alive
what or whom we believedmost likely
would remainalive
our childrenin the next war
1 A Hyangga is classical Korean poetic form that centers around mourning, spirituality, or death
