homeland is the strange raventhroated changeling
girl that i took the place of when i was a child; she’s
crouched somewhere between my fourth and fifth
ribs & her wings tap hesitantly against my sternum.
i tell the changeling girl, quiet. she tells me, stay. i am
still permanently caught in the liminal space between
the person in my skin & the person who wears my skin;
this is the collateral damage of blood & choice. i want to
feel at home in my heartbeat again, but i have only ever
had one set of lungs & they were not made for resuscitation.
loss tastes a lot like yellow dust season, by which i mean it
permeates even the cracks of my bones. it’s a bruise that i
cannot stop pressing at. can i call it mine if i no longer feel the
ache? homeland is still a fantasy-word that begs to be heard
& two halves still make a whole except when they don’t.
the changeling girl tells me, this is what annexation feels like.
Eunice Kim is a Korean-American student currently living in Seoul. She enjoys stylized realism, coffee, and thinking about the mechanics of parallel universes. Her preferred mediums of writing are poetry and short prose, which you can find more of at @ivyburied on Tumblr.
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