Cheonggyesan

I was eight, legs too short for the mountain,

lungs catching on the air. My 아버지's hand

was a rope I kept slipping from, though he never

let go.

Cheonggyesan swayed above us, stones stacking like syllables,

breath splitting in my ribs, my body the smallest pilgrim.

Merely four feet seven, yet standing on the summit

as if I'd borrowed someone else's skin.

After the climb, after the descent, at the mountain's foot,

my father bought me gomtang.

Steam erased my face. I drank the broth

as if it would vanish if I stopped.

The heat crawled down into my legs,

a thread pulling me upright from inside the bone.

Now the house is another mountain.

My parents no longer sing. Their voices grind

like rocks shifting underfoot—

each chord a landslide,

the trail torn away beneath my step.

Once, they hummed while I practiced Sor,

their voices the scaffold of my hands.

Now doors slam, china shatters, their noise sparking like dry wires.

쾅! shhh, crack!

Was it a tantrum? Or the wreckage

of papers splitting the house like fault lines?

A-levels press against my chest, each page another cliff-face,

the questions stacking higher than my breath can climb.

My parents' harmony once carried me

toward the next bar.

But it's an illusion now—like a mirage on the trail,

a lake that vanishes when you reach it,

leaving only the taste of metal where water should be.

The desk carves red into my arms.

Midnight air's stale with ink and cold tea.

Below me, voices grind like rusted gears,

rising, falling,

a quarrel rattling even

the glass of my window.

Now silence. Then noise. Then silence again,

not absence but a weight–

the air, flattened under it.

And I am eight again,

feet slipping on stone, my heels stripped raw,

the mountain's throat opens above, breath sour with ash.

I reach for a hand

that dissolved into smoke.

The wind flings me sideways like a hymn ripped mid-note.

At the base, soup waits, cooling in its bowl,

untouched, as if hunger had left me

for good.