Deluge

Kate Choi, South Korea

I’m almost done forgetting you, but there’s still

a few things left, like you saying who cares if

they say it when a boy branded me with my first

slur—you said it so confident, too, enough that for

a moment I couldn’t think why a trimmed title

would sting (lez is what we call female gays isn’t it)

and then there’s the matter of us faking sick to go

write mini poems on bathroom walls: four initials &

fuck the family, save the daughter peacocking across

black-and-white porcelain. Then there’s the after: the

lectures that split into lashings, flag split into blue-and

red, yin-and-yang: symbols of boy-and-girl, the teacher

said, staring at me—pulse liquidizing, does he know—

lurching next to the Han River on a Sunday, thinking

I knew why people sold souls & performing other such

mental acrobatics, all the while just wanting to go back

to the time where you spilled our complimentary soda

over my katsu & apologized like I should’ve at the end.

Now, everything I knock over is bone-dry: nobody

answered my question of, would it have worked if I was a—

Kate Choi is a creative writer from South Korea. She is an alumna of Iowa Young Writers' Studio, Kenyon Writers Workshop, and an Adroit Journal Poetry Mentee. She is a poetry reader for Twin Bird Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, ALOCASIA, and more.