Comfort Woman

by Tanya Ko Hong

On August 14, 1991, in Seoul, a woman named Hak Soon Kim came forward to

denounce the Japanese for the sexual enslavement of more than 200,000 women during WWII. They were referred to as “Wianbu” in Korean and “Comfort Women” in English.

1991, Seoul, South Korea

The voice on TV is comforting,

like having a person beside me

talking all the time

while I eat my burnt rice gruel.

Suddenly in Japanese

But we didn’t—

Those women came to us                                                               

for the money.

We never forced—

I dropped

my spoon into my nureun bap

On the screen

a photograph of young girls

seated in an open truck

like the one I rode with Soonja

over the rice field road that fall

Awake in a cold sweat

I gulp Jariki

bul kuk

bul kuk

but my throat still burns

It’s 3 a.m.

I reach for a cigarette

blow a smoke

and the white smog spirals

like Soonja’s wandering soul

They called me, wianbu—

a comfort woman—

I had a name.

1939, Chinju, South Kyangsan Province

We are going to do Senninbari, right?

No, Choingsindae, Women’s Labor Corps

Same thing, right?

Earn money

become new woman

come back home—

Holding tiny hands

red fingertips

bong soong ah

balsam flower red

together and colored by summer’s end

red fingertips

ripening persimmons

bending over the Choga roofs

that fade into distance

When the truck crosses over the last hill

leaving our hometown in the dust

Soonja kicks off her white shoes Ko Mu Shin

1941, That Autumn

That autumn night, Japanese

soldiers wielding swords

dragged me away

while I was gathering pine needles

they fell from my basket

filling the air with the scent of their white blood.

When you scream in your dream

there’s no sound.

Grandma’s making Song Pyunon the maru,

asking mom, Is water boiling?

Will she bring pine needles before my eye balls fall out?

I feel pain

there—

They put a long stick between my legs—

Open up, open, Baka Chosengjing!

they rage, spraying

their sperm

the smell of

burning dog

burning life

panting 

grunting on top of me—

Under my blood I am dying

1943, Shanghai, China

One night

a soldier asked all the girls,

Who can do one hundred men?

I raised my hand—

Soonja    did    not.

The soldiers put her in boiling water

alive

and

fed us.

What is living?

Is     Soonja    living  in  me?

1946, Chinju Again

One year after

liberation,

I came home.

Short hair

not wearing Han Bok

not speaking clearly

Mother hid me in the back room

At night Mother took me behind the house by the well and washed me

Scars seared with hot steel like burnt bark

like roots of old trees                                                                                          

all over my body

under the crescent glow She always smiled when she washed me

My baby! Your skin is like white jade, dazzling

She bit her lower lip

washing my tummy softly like a baby’s

but they ripped open my baby house

with the baby inside

What is dying?

Mother made white rice and seaweed soup

put my favorite white fish on top

 —but Mother, I can’t eat flesh.

She hanged herself in the granary that night

left a little bag in my room

my dowry with a rice ball.

Father threw it at me

waved his hand toward the door

I left at dusk.

30 years

40 years

forever

Mute    mute     mute

bury it with me

                       

                        They called me, wianbu—

                        I had a name.

  

 

 

1991, 3:00 AM

[That night,

the thousand blue stars

became white butterflies

through ripped rice paper,

and flew into my room.

One, One hundred, One thousand butterflies—

These endless white butterflies going through 

the web in my mouth,

going into my unhealed red scars,

stitching one by one—

butterflies lifting me, heavier than the dead

butterflies opening my bedroom door, heavier than shame.]

At

dawn,

I stand.

* * * * *

This excerpt  of  “Comfort Woman” was first published in Beloit Poetry

Korean American poet, Tanya Ko Hong, has been published in Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Portside, Cultural Weekly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Mother to Myself, A collection of poems in Korean (Prunsasang Press, 2015). Fluent in Korean and English, Tanya is an ongoing advocate of bilingual poetry, promoting the work of immigrant poets. She lives in Palos Verdes, California with her husband and three children. Find out more at www.tanyakohong.com 

Kneeling and Falling

by Florence Weinberger

Has my mother fallen to her knees?  Memory

is never enough, I believe her head’s nearly touching

the radio, I’m old enough to know Roosevelt’s voice,

I can hear the dusk of war in his grief, and see,

my mother’s hand is at her throat. 

She tells me, years later, no matter whose war,

the Jews will be on the losing end.

Jews are forbidden to kneel to anyone, not even God.

Only on the Day of Atonement, the cantor falls

prostrate, humbled for all of us, and I, in the dazzling

cathedral where Lori got married, couldn’t fold

to the kneeling bench at my feet.

Keening without consciousness, my father dropped

as if he’d been struck when my mother died,

and slowly my sister and I raised him up. 

Sometimes in yoga when I double over into

the child’s pose, knees and elbows tucked under,

I could be that girl sunk down next to my young mother

and it looks a lot like prayer.

* * * * *

"Kneeling and Falling" was first published in Miramar

All Memory is a Lie

by Florence Weinberger

I knew, when I was two,

the woman I followed up the stairs on all fours

was my mother, and the child she carried my little sister.

My vocabulary too crude to describe her shoes.

Did they have laces, was she wearing hose?

No one tracked me to freeze that crabbed climb,

the way they posed me bare-assed

on fake leopard when I was five months old—

And the kitchen that we entered when we reached

the top (I don’t see my father)

has an ice box, and an iron tub she bathed me in.

There must have been an ironing board, a hot iron

carelessly left plugged in, a sink over which

she peeled potatoes, so she could wrap my burning fingers

with those cooling strips.

Why is it I remember my mother’s tears

when my sister speaks only of her laughter?

Maybe it’s because all the memories we carted

as we moved from house to house, from coast to coast,

the ones we kept in shards and flashes,

were always wrong and always vivid and seldom shared.

Maybe it’s because memory is all scars, and still alive.

* * * * *

"All Memory is a Lie" was first published in the Topanga Messenger.

How to make a good pumpkin pie

by Grace Marie Grafton

It’s near Thanksgiving. In her anguish

she wishes to conjure a narrative that would

lure the family out of their parallel distractions,

their cold slumber. How many hands

carry the small memories?

Did Dad really hunt that deer,

did Grandpa grapple with the thief

under the sycamore, was there

the gleam of a gun? Nothing as serious

as murder but never the lifting of the rug.

Her aunt wept but turned her head away,

everyone knew whose baby

it was, but portraits weren’t

allowed and nobody asked for filet mignon.

So she hauls out the cloud shawl

to cover the nicks in the diningroom table,

harvests pomegranates, unstitches

the web that veils the doorway.

A display of brushes and paints,

watercolor paper in a pile, an old record

of children’s shouts and laughter in the yard

under the tarpaulin. Her nephews –

their daring percussion, her daughters

braiding and unbraiding everyone’s hair.

* * * * *

"How to make a good pumpkin pie" was first published in Sin Fronteras.

Grace Marie Grafton is the author of six collections of poems, most recently 'Jester,' published by Hip Pocket Press. She has taught thousands of children to write poetry through her work with CA Poets in the Schools.

Passion

by Grace Marie Grafton

Lend my heart to a passion flower in Surinam

because it has guardian ants and there

my heart would be, tucked down

between the stems of the pistils

and the ants would assume it to be integral

to the flower and would guard it from all threat.

I'd be safe. At least, my heart would be.

Yesterday I heard a poet say 'the price of love.'

Of course she didn't mean legal tender or even

a ring or deed to a house. She meant sorrow.

Do the guardian ants love the flower, their job?

I'd like to think so, maybe an insect kind of

love but I know I love the passion flower and,

despite the fact that I know it will die and

I will die (the ants too), it still feels good.

I want to share my passion with their

passion, just look at the color of those petals,

just look how beautifully my heart fits under the

cerise punctuation of the pistils, look at the articulated

dangerous complexity of the ants' legs.

* * * * *

"Passion" was first published in Askew.

Grace Marie Grafton is the author of six collections of poems, most recently 'Jester,' published by Hip Pocket Press. She has taught thousands of children to write poetry through her work with CA Poets in the Schools.

Another Morning on Earth

by Meryl Natchez

On the altar in the living room, pictures of my parents,

my brother at 40—one of the last photos—Larry’s parents,

my mother and her sisters on Atlantic City Boardwalk in the 30’s,

and Erwin, my mother’s last love, for the besotted, lively gaze

she turns on him, though I try to keep him

behind the flowers. Perhaps they watch me,

even watch over me. When I fell

and it was just bad enough

to put up railings and walk more slowly,

I felt they had given me a warning.

Or when the baby is here, or when we gather,

turkey or brisket or pot de crème, or an ordinary morning,

open newspaper or book or laptop, the ramekin of salt

on the table—there they are,

watching.

I change the flowers as they wilt,

alstroemerias, anemones, the last sweet peas,

because I want my dead to keep watching out for us,

for the children and grandchildren and beloved friends

in this chancy world where death lurks on the landing

or in the car, or microbes

or snipers or breast

or bone or stomach.

What do they think about the time I waste?

Such an abundance that I throw whole hours

into online Scrabble or Threes with the excuse that they

are a form of meditation,

because it’s hard to be here now,

now being a confused elixir

of sun and fog and email and bird shadow and superstition

and chicken feet and toast and news

and insatiable longing and I have to pee, a fusillade

of random moments that can converge

into a ravishing pattern,

which I have, from time to time and briefly, glimpsed.

But mostly I wander the planet with blinders on,

going somewhere fast.

I like to keep moving.

I like my time full.

And I like to believe that because

their photos look out from their niche

in the living room, they are present, and if

I keep a fresh parade of flowers on the altar

they will keep on keeping me

from harm.

With today's brilliant poem "The Conservation of Matter" by Meryl Natchez, Writing In A Woman's Voice goes on a week's summer solstice vacation until June 25, 2017. Happy mid-summer days to all!

The Conservation of Matter

by Meryl Natchez

                                    for J. E.

I follow the hump of the whale exhaling

as it heads for the Bering Sea. I want to see it, and see it again,

closer. Or branches in a storm, their exuberant dance

with the wind. Even rain on a New York street,

cigarette butts in the gutter, taxis splattering. I can’t get enough of it.

You say: When we die we cease to exist. Everything else

is illusion. But what about that law of physics:

the conservation of matter? How water changes to

steam or ice—mass plus energy

equal to the first wet splash.

And this hard-won companionship, smelted

in a blaze day after day—surely something endures.

Slowly, light turns the bay slate blue.

Night departs. Morning reappears.

The dead look out from their accustomed photos,

stopped in time, but not altogether silent.

The last whiff of the whale’s breath

transforms into ocean, air.

FINAL FITTING

by Judith Offer

for Toni Locke

[1917-2015]

Stand still;  I am trying to fit this poem around you,

Around your wrinkly smile and your eyes of sky,

Around your recorder waiting on the piano bench;

While you drift to the dining room,

Drawn to the afternoon sun spreading  gold

Over your geraniums and your jig saw puzzle.

If you would come back in here

And listen to what I have so far,

The way you always have,

I’m sure this poem would gather neatly around you.

But I stand here, mouth full of pins,

And you float further away,

Across your spare kitchen, out your porch door,

Over the bird feeder and the bird clothesline.

I basted the pieces of your poem yesterday,

A New England style that will be the real you,

Never blustery, nor braggadocio:

A Boismoitier duet, or a Baton,

Or maybe a folk song from your book.

But on you float, over the wormy apple that made good sauce,

Toward The Food Mill and Farmer Joe’s

And I suppose Laurel Books.

The fine fabric of your new poem

Is the one you wove yourself, Toni:

The warp, things unspoken but judiciously lived:

How you kept your body moving;

How you didn’t own things you couldn’t use;

How you tried to make sure

Everyone’s children knew the songs;

How you collected real friends,

The ones who did something for someone else.

The woof is the things you were moved to say:

How you learned to edit a newspaper,

So the people could hang together on the truth;

How you enjoyed and admired your children,

And their children and their children;

How fast and furious and funny life is,

And how impossible to control.

The poem is almost done;  one fitting won’t take long.

I know you’ll love it; you’ll wear it forever.

If you will only come back over here and stand still. 

* * * * *

Judith Offer has had two daughters, five books of poetry and dozens of plays. (Eighteen of the latter, including six musicals, have been produced.)  She has read her poetry at scores of poetry venues, but is particularly delighted to have been included in the Library of Congress series and on “All Things Considered,” on NPR.  Her writing reflects her childhood in a large Catholic family—with some Jewish roots—her experience as teacher, community organizer, musician, historian, gardener, and all-purpose volunteer, and her special fascination with her roles of wife and mother.  Her most recent book of poetry, called DOUBLE CROSSING, is poems about Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, Stuart.

AND THEIRS, THEM

by Judith Offer

We are the women of small histories/

            diaries, journals, letters to our sisters/

whose mothers recited earlier accounts

while mixing turkey stuffing or brownies

in any coffee-flavored kitchen.

We are the keepers of  lesser treasures/

            relish recipes, songs our uncles sang,

            steps to the old dances/

whose children are relentlessly photographed

and ride the years from sharp to fading

in masks of cellophane.

We are the bearers of background memories/

            his last words, her first song,

            Thanksgiving before the war/

whose grandchildren will grow

to remember us

and theirs, them.

* * * * *

 "And Theirs, Them" first appeared in the author's collection The First Apples.

Judith Offer has had two daughters, five books of poetry and dozens of plays. (Eighteen of the latter, including six musicals, have been produced.)  She has read her poetry at scores of poetry venues, but is particularly delighted to have been included in the Library of Congress series and on “All Things Considered,” on NPR.  Her writing reflects her childhood in a large Catholic family—with some Jewish roots—her experience as teacher, community organizer, musician, historian, gardener, and all-purpose volunteer, and her special fascination with her roles of wife and mother.  Her most recent book of poetry, called DOUBLE CROSSING, is poems about Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, Stuart.

           

Culture of Rape

by Kathleen Murphey

Nolan Bruder and Brock Turner,

Birds of a feather, flock together,

Drug and Rape, Drug and Rape.

Whether his sister or a stranger,

he’s got a dick, so he’ll stick it in,

screw it if she’s unwilling.

Judges care more about him than the victim;

one brutally raped by a swimmer,

the other, a minor, raped by her brother.

Doesn’t seem like there is much honorable

about judges William Follett and Aaron Perskey

when they condone the abuse of young women

by turning the perpetrators loose.

These cases should be national disgraces,

and yet, the president of the United States

grabs women by the pussy, so why shouldn’t they?

Watch out girls and women,

we live in a culture of rape,

and pretty soon, without insurance coverage

for birth control or access to legal abortion,

we’ll be just like Offred from

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale.

* * * * *

Kathleen Murphey is an associate professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.  Recently, she has been writing fiction (both short stories and poetry) on women’s and social justice issues.  To learn more about her work, see www.kathleenmurphey.com. 

Cleveland, 1962

I’m glad I went with my father

to see the bridge abutment going nowhere.

He had seen it when he drove by

in his City bus, was curious, told me

with some excitement, and I, fourteen

and usually bored, for some reason

said I’d go. And so we drove down

trashed deserted streets to the dead-end

where a bridge out over the tracks

was gone now, all but the huge orange

metal braces, some cables the size

of my father’s waist, and he told me

how it must have been, showed me

on the street across where it must

have joined, how you must have been

able then to drive right over

to Little Italy, and I smiled and nodded.

I think I did.

* * * * *

Gail Rudd Entrekin is Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press and Editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (www.canarylitmag.org).  She is Editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002).

Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Southern Poetry Review, were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011, and won the Women’s National Book Association Award in 2016. 

Entrekin taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years.  Her books of poetry include The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press 2016); Rearrangement of the Invisible, (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012); Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998); and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).  She and her husband, poet and novelist Charles Entrekin, live in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay.