A Good Soldier
Poetry
My grandmother sits with me at the bus stop,
the place we’ve been so many times before
Our bodies, like tar
etched into the seats
She
piles stacks of foil-covered pieces
of fried bread with jelly
into my lap.
Contained in metal walls
the hot barley tea
steams up her reading glasses and
smells of summer nights
She heaps the bread into my mom’s arms, and maybe
she tells her not to be so hard on me or maybe
she tells her don’t lose your passport, or 사랑해, 보고 싶을거야1 or maybe
My feet dangle from the seats at the bus stop and I kick
at the posts, unprotected
heel to metal
and metal to heel,
but I am not Achilles.
I know when to walk away from this fight:
when Halmuni
tells me to. It’s unladylike.
And I stare at the little blue dot on her forehead, right between all her wrinkles, ready to ask her for the hundredth time
how
she got that strange blue dot and my heel is ready to reload, to cock back
and shoot at the seat like
those guns in America
but I stop.
I hear the bus screech
the hiss of the doors
as they open but
I have not yet reloaded and
I am not ready.
And no matter how much I cry
and wail and plead
I have lost
this battle and will soon lose the war of staying with Halmuni.
And the enemy will corral me up
the bus steps as I look
over my shoulder, snot dripping down my face.
And the enemy
will try to comfort
me
as people shuffle down the aisle and tell her
how much I look like her.
And I will regret not resisting
more that day, not throwing
myself down and pummelling
the sticky tar-covered concrete with my fists but it is not my fault.
A good soldier is far too obedient. The enemy will pay.
So when she asks if I would rather have her
or Halmuni as my mother
she will already know the answer before I even open my mouth.
1I love you and I’ll miss you