Kids Running After a Car
                after the Korean War

Asphalt covered half the street; the rest was
overgrown with sunberries we ate. At the sound of a horn,
we ran to the car; in its bluish smoke, we saw
our future like a 3-D film. When my friend

JC tied his feet to the back bumper of a jeep
to sneak a ride, its engine started;
market people screamed as his bleeding head
was dragged for a hundred yards.

Our most daring venture was to the mountain cave
to dig out bullets for spinning tops' axles.
But we had to cross locals' territory—my forehead
still bears the scar of a thrown stone.

These road brawls ended when someone
in the cave shouted: Corpses!—soldiers in a mass grave.
Yet, those were carefree days. Dropping by any house
at mealtime, I ate with them if they laid me a place

—if not, I played next to their dinner table.
House doors were left unlocked:
what thief would steal an empty bag of rice?
In summer, we slept in the public pool's storage shack,

no parents looking for us.
It was the children's utopia: what we didn't have,
we didn't need. Even now, walking my suburban street
late at night, I snoop around for remnants of those days:

that sour tailpipe smoke must be a shimmer
in the air somewhere on Earth.
from the journal NEW OHIO REVIEW 
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After the Korean War, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. An English newspaper once wrote, "Expecting democracy in Korea is like hoping for roses to bloom in a trash can." This was the world of my childhood—harsh, but not without hope. Neighborhood kids were close, sharing what little we had. Yet when we crossed into other kids' territory, fights broke out. These battles mirrored the adults’ war, teaching us, even as children, how deeply conflict shaped our lives.

Hee-June Choi on "Kids Running After a Car"
Color cover image for DEED by torrin a. greathouse
"A Donne for Our Times: On Deed by torrin a. greathouse"

“Not only is there the comradery of a walk that says the same thing about another’s body as yours says about your own, but this can create a world—even if it is only a world of two—within which the only meaning that matters is one of your own creation. This is a world carved out within the broader world in which an ER visit is a date and medications are there for you when saints aren’t. greathouse’s body and poetic forms are chimeras, which at one point they define as 'the best parts of / other animals sewn together,' and through this SICK4SICK relationship they have also made their world a chimera.”

via THE RUMPUS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Riggs on Language as Form 

"I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be.  There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written.  To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series.  To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses."
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