Mouth to Mouth
after Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
and after ì›…ë…€, the first Korean mother,
who was a bear
Bared noise. Bear
noise. To lay bare
To bear it. Bear and grin.
Bear and grin, tooth bared.
Begin. Burgeon. Beguile. Bare truth
boar tooth, tusk husk of. Trough
truffle. Trifle. Trouble. Burr. Braid
this noise. Bared groan grown torn tear
a tare a grain again of
wound. Refueling the pause.
Pregnant. Uttering. Uterine.
Rudderless. Hers, urs, bear.
As in a crowded bar,
where individual voices
blur dissolve the burr
wears and the rasps
smooth smear across
the ear the air across
the gaps
I was never quick but
I got to many places all at once
that was my talent the gift given
the single coin cackhanded god
stuck behind my ear like a cheap
trick, a sleight, a slight
the lazy steganography
of the world, of the eye.
How much better to be we
who were born
in the mutter
the pause, pregnant
the utterance contracts
we bore the marks
and we were the marks
in the uterine the Mutter
the sea inside the Mar
the Mur-Mur, the children called it
we broke into we broke in two
song tongues
Sam Cha is from Korea. He earned an MFA at UMass Boston. A Pushcart Prize winner, and a recipient of the St. Boltoph’s Club Emerging Artists Prize, his work has appeared in apt, Assay, Best New Poets, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Memorious, and Missouri Review. His chapbook, American Carnage, was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018. His full-length collection of cross-genre work, The Yellow Book, was published by [PANK] Books in 2020. Long a resident of Cambridge, MA, Sam lives with his family (+ 2 cats and an elderly guinea pig) in Brooklyn.