Original art by Fernando Mendez Corona
Chiwan Choi
at best
we will lose each other
at something we have been taught
to call the end.
but look
not beyond the rubble of los angeles
the destruction that became
of our lives
but in it, in the heart of it
the skeleton that rises
into silence
bones of apartments and arms
don’t believe them
when they tell you
there is nothing above us
but god
go
climb up
and find the room
and you will see what is left of our city
our home
the life we had
promised to
each other
look around
do you see the bricks on the floor
rebuild it and call this place immaculate
there will be no god
nor angels
nor anything invisible they asked us
to believe in
instead
on the balcony
you will see a body
walking toward you
and a face that peeks in
with a smile
and you will say
i know your name
i have known your name
and one by one
we will arrive
and gather
and rebuild all of it
with our names
rejoice
we will rejoice
sing the songs
of our names
and fill the skies
with laughter.
Chiwan Choi is the author of 3 books of poetry, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press, 2010), Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), and The Yellow House (CCM, 2017). He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Esquire.com, and The Nervous Breakdown. He is currently at work on My Name Is Wolf, the follow up to The Yellow House. Chiwan is a partner at Writ Large Press, a Los Angeles based indie publisher, focused on using literary arts to resist, disrupt, and transgress, and a member of The Accomplices. Chiwan was born in Seoul, Korea, spent his early childhood in Asunción, Paraguay, and now splits his time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Copyright: © 2020 Chiwan Choi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
