산토끼 토끼야
어디를 가느냐
깡총깡총 뛰면서
어디를 가느냐

san tto kki, tto kki ya
mountain rabbit, rabbit
eo di run ka nu nya
where are you going?
kkang chong kkang chong dui myeon seo
thump thump, hopping while running
eo di run ka nu nya
where are you going?

i. ha-na

Two fingers held up and out
in a peace sign
shaken in a certain rhythm
back and forth in front of the chest
or held at the side of the head

Each phrase moves through the air
from the child's lips in an arched rainbow

Her fingers are twins with connected feet,
quivering alien antennae, bunny ears

She is able to balance by herself
on the teeter-totter
has rung her head more than once
against the metal bars of the jungle gym

And in the market, sometimes
people point at her and stare

When she sings this song
san tto kki tto kki ya
she holds up her chubby hand
splays her fingers so they copy
the other kids
and mirror the gap in her teeth

but she doesn't know
what any of the words mean

ii. dul

She ran away again this morning
from the mini-bus,
the minder with his cheery yu-chi-won vest,
beckoning with a downturned palm.

The twack of her school bag
was loud against her white tights,

but her mother caught her
by the collar before the gate
of the campus and somehow managed

to ignore her screams
as the van door slid crisply into place.

iii. set

Behind the foam pads the children pile up
at play time, the oe-gug-in, the foreign girl,
has been crying.

She hears them start their recitations,
syllables repeated after Teacher
loudly, in unison, one single voice,
a beautiful body with many mouths.

She burrows deeper into her hidey-hole.

iv. net

Older now, she is good at nodding
in taxis, saying neh,
turn left please, go up please
thank you, goodbye, thank you

the beaded seats imprint her thighs
in sticky humid August, hard ginseng candy
and the suck of the taxi drivers' teeth

the same conversation like bird droppings
on her shoulder

why are you here?
where are you from?
how long have you lived here?

a hundred times,

eventually she learns to lie
and says she's from Russia

although that's not better

because it means

whore

v. da-seot

an early memory:

The rat ran into the living room,
a quick blur on the pale yellow linoleum.

This is a room she only can conjure in this memory,
a room with a rat in it, house that smelled like an older
Korea, overripe persimmons over compound walls,
smoke from barrel fires, tear gas and cold breath,
brown rice tea, Chinese medicine shops, monsoon sweat.

Stories of a time before: slicky boys and open sewage,
women in white cotton hanbok pounding clothes clean
along the Cheonggyecheon

Stories of her missionary grandparents disembarking
the steam ship, her daddy wrapped in a blanket
for the sea voyage, but that feels like a different country
in a different time,

This is the year of the Olympics! The Han is being dredged.
She will eat ramyeon from a styrofoam cup! And yes,
there are still rats!

vi. yeo-seot

all the crooked alleys
lead to a corner store
stuffed like steamed mandu
with goodies

she walked there by herself
down the pig path
past the local elementary school

stacks of origami paper, pens
candy, plastic pinwheels and doodads
bought with the change
she lugged there in a plastic baggie

every perfect colorful thing could be bought
at the ka-ge, and she knows enough to ask

how much is this?

Outside the trash pickers and the sorters
in their yellow vests rumbled by
pulling wagons on rubber wheels

She didn't know they were paid the same amount
for their haul as for hers, packs of fuzzy stickers
she slapped haphazardly into a memory book

vii. il-kop

In eighth grade, the street signs on the road
back to Yeonhui Dong
coalesced one day into sounds

she sucked in her breath

and could read

viii. yeo-deol
gab-ja-gi the earliest lyric

of her life needled up

from the ether

all of a sudden
san tto kki, tto kki ya

all of a sudden
joy at these no-longer-nonsense
words
all of a sudden!
she understood!

Mountain rabbit, rabbit
Where are you going

but she still didn't get it right,
what she thought it said after
Mountain Rabbit was

dang-geun not kkang chong

dang-geun dang-geun it nun so

which would mean
I have a carrot

and she was wrong in thinking
the last line was
I'll give it to you if you just come home

ix. ah-hop

When she was small, people said the Han bred mutant fish

the threat of nuclear war hung like smog over her blonde head

Later, in college, she read of North Korean kids
who hunted and ate rats, how they peeled trees
of their bark. That was just across the 38th parallel
while she ate bowl after bowl of white rice

x. yeol

Of the A3 sheet of one hundred vocab words
verbs copied out on notecards

thousands memorized in her time
taught by Teacher
who used to be a Korean-Air stewardess

and who used to yell
SHI-KKI-RO! to their meaningless
chitter-chatter

she only remembers a few

it da
to exist
haeng bok ha da
to be happy
ah rum tap da
to be beautiful
molla
don't know

and

ma eum ee ap pu da
my heart hurts

Kristina Erny

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