*Poem best viewed on desktop.

self-portrait as a firefly 

i. 
Mom says, there are trillions of cells inside you 
and each one loves you. I try to believe her, but I blame myself 

each time I bite my fingernails to blood. Each time 
the man idles in his neon yellow Prius too long 

at the corner, his eyes holding questions I can’t silence.
Meanwhile, spring lizards map my antennae, their tongues gone 

sticky in summer’s moonless dark. She says, even in dark, the body
makes its own light. We are our own moons, peripheral 

redness constellating the corners of my sight. Even in downpour, inside
sun-fists thrown like rice into the steam of August. Even then— 

my little moon blinks, keeps blinking, keeps lighting 
the matchstick of my belly until it softens into sleep. 

Even as I sleep, the night owls still watch like mothers.
Last night, when I curled my body into its crescent 

of sleep, my mother’s words filled my dreamscape’s 
technicolor clouds: ae-gi-ya(1), you were never the world’s

favorite girl—but you do know how to glow. Never lose that. 

ii. 

Your bedroom door is shut—completely shut. Not even the fists
my father drowned in the frozen lake of the doctor’s silence 

could slip through. Is everything okay— through the wood
I couldn’t hear the answer to will i live? These days, I start each day 

by peering through the glass window, to see whether you’re whispering
to father, whether the green 50 on the monitor still blinks 

its firefly pulse. Your head gleams, a skyless moon glowing through
the turban that once held your brown ponytails I tied before 

school, giggling through the wind. I’m old enough to know 
the transparent tube trailing across your chest may not lift you 

from the white-sheeted bed. It may not twist your doorknob
with the same strong grip you once used to lift me when I sailed 

on your shoulders through the sea of chirping sparrows, their songs
overpowered by a family who never stopped talking, long before 

we chose silence over the question burning our tongues. Now, the door
stays closed. I press my forehead to the glass, watching my reflection 

tremble yours. Outside, the june sun hums. Inside, I imagine us lying
beneath it, passing cookie dough between us: one spoon, your eyes 

brushing the tumor in your breast away for just one day. I tell myself
it’s possible the body is a lantern—that light only shifts, from room 

to room, quieting. Even as yours dims, I keep blinking, keep lighting
the matchstick of my belly, waiting to answer you wherever you’re led.

__

1 Baby in Korean