First Person Plural: Voices of Adoption: Korean Adoptee Perspectives

POV

24 years ago

Every adoptee has a unique and compelling story to tell. In Fall of 2000, NAATA placed an "open call" to Korean adoptees from around the country for personal stories and creative writing for this website. Our goal: to expand the body of creative and personal expression made by adoptees and to illustrate the diversity of their experiences. We extend our thanks to everyone who submitted material and while we could not present all submissions, we are honored to present here a selection of writings by eight adoptees.

Heather Papp

And unto this day a baby is born, and she shall be called Heather Elizabeth Hwa Sook Lee Papp. And the people--whoever they are--shall rejoice? --(circa February 4, 1974, Seoul, South Korea)

I used to think I gave birth to myself; that I opened my mouth and said, "AAAAAAHHHHH" and out plopped 100% of me--a healthy, happy baby girl who gurgled and drooled on herself. This creation myth implies that I carried on with self-sufficiency. I either pulled my baby self up and rapidly learned how to scrounge for food and shelter and clothe myself, or I skipped babyhood altogether and grew into a capsule of a human being--doing fine on my own, thank you very much. It took me quite a few years to shake these notions, and I'm sure I did damage to both myself and others in the process. Today, I stand corrected. I have an antecedent. I am meaningfully connected to others. What I do affects them, and them, me. I need people in my life.

Need. Like a baby wrapped in a blanket and left on a doorstep, crying.

II. So the children gathered on the street and lined up to play the game. A voice announced,"You,over there! Take five baby steps." I hesitated, and then replied, "Mother, may I?" --(here and now, San Francisco, California)

I'm awakened by a phone call at 4:00 in the morning. It's Moto calling from Japan, where I'll soon join him. We've been doing the frustrating stretch of bridging different time zones for the past two months. Sun there, moon here. He tells me that today, he tried to see a ghost.

Moto and I have been going back and forth, working out the intricacies of heart, mind and logistics as we plan a marriage long-distance. I've called him up with late afternoon tears after realizing how difficult it will be to process a green card for him. He has sent me the floor plan of the house where we'll live in Japan and asked, "What do you prefer--bed or futon?" And across this divide, we've confronted some of the harder questions and sensed the boundaries to the answers. I point-blank asked him one day, "Is it OK with your parents that I'm Korean and American?" His answer rotated from, "Of course it's OK," to, "Some people will make it hard for us."

And as that settles with me and my growing consciousness of myself as Korean American, all I can do is acknowledge that everyone has to find their way in a vast, soupy unknown. But, of course, there are concerns that cannot be shrugged off. How do I erase from mind the image of Soon-Deuk Kim, former Korean comfort woman who stood incandescent at a recent panel discussion in Oakland, and told of the atrocities done her by Japanese soldiers? Or those somber passages in books that detail the existence of Korean ghettos in Japan, widely considered "the bad parts of town"? And what about the fact that Koreans who are essentially, culturally Japanese are still denied voting rights in Japan on the basis of ethnicity alone? Conflict of interests, possibly, and one that will make more or less sense to me, depending on the day.

I stand grounded on the fact that, here, right now, Moto sees me with as much clarity as anyone. Ironic that he's Japanese? Maybe, but probably not. He comes from a place much different from my own. But his inner world intersects with mine in ways that make me feel cushioned when venturing close to the edge of trying to figure out what this Korean stuff is all about. And should I go over the edge, I may grow wings and fly all by myself; but if not, he's there to help me fall gently. And what's more, he's there to tell me something about myself after I dust off my knees.

By the glare of my alarm clock, which now reads 4:30 in the morning, I listen to him tell me that he tried to see a ghost. And my sleepy eyes open, and my sleepy voice says, "Next time you try to see a ghost, Moto, will you please try to see my mother?"

And the answer comes back, "I do."

PERSONAL STATEMENT: I love my parents Paul and Ann Papp, and my brother Mark, very much. They become clearer to me as I become clearer to myself. I want to see them soon. In the meantime, I ask them to wait for me until I can hold their hands in person. And hopefully, when we're together again, I'll be able to connect the hands of my family with the hands of the family I have now started.

Love is good, isn't it?

Thank you.

Jamie Kemp

Learning to Trust

The odyssey of an adopted Korean, ending in her own back yard

Learning to trust is a very hard thing to do whether you are adopted or not. In my case, I am adopted, and adoptees, I believe, have a more difficult challenge to face. This is the story of the challenges I faced, and the reasons why.

I was left by my birth mother at the age of two and a half, and was then shuffled around to various homes until the age of three and a half, when I was finally placed with my adoptive family. From the information available to me, I estimate that I stayed in seven or eight homes in that one year.

Consequently, I apparently learned at a very young and crucial age, that people left me without any reason. These feelings of rejection were re-enforced each time I moved to another home, and with the rejection came feelings of mistrust. Subconciously, I carried those feelings with me and brought them into my childhood and adult relationships, especially with my adoptive family. In addition to the burden of mistrust, I grew up always wondering about my 'ghost' past and my 'ghost' country of Korea.

When I volunteered at Children's Home Society of Minnesota for a Korean adoptee panel this past spring, Jeff Mondloh (in post-placement services) asked me if I had been back to Korea yet, and if I wanted to go.

My response was "I would love to go, but it is so expensive to do it and I don't have a thousand dollars to burn right now." He then explained to me about the Holt Korean Adoptee Summer School which costs only $200 for three weeks, everything included, plus $300 of your airfare.

Within the next week I applied for the program via e-mail. Then, about a month later, I received a phone call that I had been accepted. Even though I wanted to go to Korea more than anything, I was a little undecided. I had some fears about going, the cost was still high for me, I would need to take time off work, and arrange for care for my three-year-old daughter. Jeff took the time to talk to me more about going, and within the next week I had made up my mind, and made all the arrangements to make it possible.

So now I was left with the question, " What is my main purpose for going?"

At first my main purpose was to go and learn about Korea with my own two eyes. Not just from books or the stories all of my adopted Korean friends told me. I had always had the burning ambition to experience Korea for myself and to walk away with a better understanding of what happened 23 years ago.

But something happened inside me as I let it all sink in that I was actually going to Korea. I thought to myself 'Why not try to find this person listed in your file since you're going to Korea anyway?" Every year since I was maybe 13, I re-read my file from top to bottom. In it, there was one intriguing piece of information. The name and address of a woman, Mrs. Kim, 315-Sassamoon 2 Dong, Dobong Ku, Seoul, S. Korea. She was named as the woman who cared for me for a two-month period, the person who was asked by my birth mother to care for me. The information I had was that my birth mother never came back so I was then regarded as abandoned.

Immediately, I started my own search for her, contacting Catholic Charities to send me more information regarding my adoption. I then contacted Social Welfare Society to set up a date to meet to review my file and to visit the address and the police box where I was left.

I then worked on my search for a month and a half, spending 10 to 15 hours per week contacting various organizations, trying to see if I could find this woman. I wanted to find her so badly because I knew from information from other adoptees' searches that children are nearly always taken to the orphanages/police stations by a family member or a close friend. On top of the time I spent on my search, I had to work my full-time job during the day, my part-time job at night, and also spend every moment I could with my little girl. I was only getting three to five hours of sleep per night during the last couple of weeks before I left for Korea. I think my determination grew because it never sat well with me that she was just some lady who cared for me. If that is all it was, why would she have gone to the trouble of leaving a name and address? There had to be more to it. I had to find out the truth.

During my search for Mrs. Kim I went through some deep emotions. Like many adopted Koreans who search for birth families, I was emotionally ripped apart, and had my strength and ambition tested to the limit. Doors were closed continually in my face. People told me what I was doing was impossible. At each door slam, I would cry for two or three seconds, then I would get up again and try to to think of other avenues to search. I had no help in doing this.

As I retraced my steps backwards into the past, I found that my fear of abandonment became real again, not as a child, but as an adult. I stared at my file, realizing that for an entire year of my life, from age two and a half to age three and a half, I had been alone without any family, friends, or even any "real" name. My name was changed with each new home, as if I were a puppy dog. That was a really hard thing for me to face and deal with.

It was at this point that I realized I did now have people to turn to - my "real family." Those of us who are adopted know that our "real" families are actually our adoptive families. For the first time in my life, I realized that I needed to ask for their help and support. That was a tough thing. In the past, they always gave it to me whether I wanted it or not. They gave me that love and support without even needing to think about it, and I thought to myself 'Wow I can actually trust them and let myself fully love them for the rest of my life.' For the last 23 years I had always rejected their love. Now it was time to grow up.

When I was young, I felt that if I wasn't their perfect child that I wouldn't have a home any more. This was simply not true. During my teen years, I challenged their love continually. I rebelled at everything and anything I could. I would purposely test them to see if they would pass or fail and they would always pass. So then I would get angry at them for passing and then test them again. They never left my side, and although there was a time in my life when they had to show me tough love, they never left me or stopped loving me. I kept thinking, "Why do you still want me to be your daughter? I am not acting like a perfect child any more, why do you still think that you love me?" I kept thinking "When are you going to leave me?"

My poor mother kept saying the words, "Jamie, you are my daughter. I chose to adopt you. Adoption is always a chosen thing. I will always be here as your mother and I will never leave you." She said those words for many years until she was blue in the face. I could never get myself to believe those words. Nothing she could ever say would have been good enough for me at the time I was rejecting them. Deep down inside, I always wanted and needed their love more than anything in the world, but it was much safer for me to deny it.

For me, the fear of another abandonment was a very real and scary thing. I couldn't let myself get too close to them but now since I was ripping open many old wounds that needed to heal, I made the discovery that they are not the enemy. They are my family and they will forever be there for me no matter what. They have proven their love for me for every day of the last 23 years, and during my search, I realized finally that, without them, I would have been nothing but a lost child with no family to call my own.

I learned so many new things while I was in Korea. I learned that women are not treated as people. When a married couple gets divorced the father has all the rights to the children and can strip the mother away from her children. She has no say in anything, and when the father takes the children away and finds himself in a difficult situation he can place the children for adoption without the mother's knowledge. The rate of alcoholism is very high in Korea among men. Many die of cirrhosis of the liver at a young age.

In Korea, many families are poor and young girls from poor families hang out with prostitutes after school and sell themselves to earn more money to buy the things they want. Women are discriminated against in both big ways and small ways. For example, it is considered disrespectful for young women to smoke out in public on the streets, so they must smoke in the bathroom stalls or in a bar or coffee shop.

There isn't any social welfare system in Korea to help young single mothers. If pregnant women are young and unwed they are ostracized from their families. Most pregnant single women keep their pregnancy a secret, and eventually find a birthing home for unwed mothers.

We visited an unwed mother's home during the tour. I was deeply moved by these young women and shocked at the same time. The shocking part is seeing how young they are. I remember all of the adoptees on our tour sitting with their mouths hanging open in disbelief as we sat across the room from the unwed mothers. They were some teenage girls sitting in the front of the group acting like little children playing. We were all reflecting that this could have been the same situation with our own birthmothers. It all hit way too close to home - the realization of the maturity level of these girls who were about to become mothers was too hard to swallow because we were the end products of this, being sent away for adoption.

The most moving part of the visit with these young women was when most of them said they wanted their babies to be sent overseas. Their reasoning, they said, is that if they grow up in the West they will know they are adopted, and their birth mothers may be able to meet them some day. In Korea, if children are adopted domestically, the chances that the birth mothers will meet their child again are very slim since the Korean family will more than likely never tell them they are adopted. The main reason for them choosing to do overseas adoption is because they can't bear knowing their child is only within a six-hour distance if they do a domestic adoption. They said they would wonder constantly as they walked past children on the streets whether that was their child.

scream out on the subway and on the bus "Are any of you my birth mother?" I could hardly bear the thought that I am in such a small country, so close to her and I can't even find or recognize my own birth mother. The amount of pain the birth mothers must go through is ten times worse, so I truly understood why they choose overseas adoption.

But the one thing that should not go unnoticed is that these women place their child for adoption with an immense amount of love and thought. These women have choices to either place their child over seas, domestic adoption or care for the child on their own. If there was no unwed mother's home these women could die during a child birth, isolated by the stigma of unwed motherhood.

During my home stay in Seoul for one evening, I learned so much about a typical poor Korean family. Another tour member and I stayed with a family of five in a very tiny apartment with two and a half bedrooms, a small kitchen and bathroom. Our meals consisted of a bowl of rice, three different kinds of old kimchi, pickles, anchovies and a potato dish. The family consisted of a 15-year-old girl, a 14-year-old sister, a brother age 9 and their parents. The father did not greet us because he was out getting drunk with his friends and was too hungover in the morning to take us to church, and when we got back from church he had already left to meet his friend. We did not meet her mother because she was taking care of a sick relative. So it was just all of the kids plus the grandmother.

The part of Seoul where they lived had streets littered with some garbage and smelled of sewage. The family had little furniture, and mostly sat on the floor with mats and blankets if they wanted to watch TV. It was easy to tell why there were three children, with two older girls and a younger boy. The son had his own photo album while the girls did not have one. He was prized and very spoiled. The whole experience made me appreciate the life I have now and my life growing up. Not only did I feel gratitude for just the obvious material things, but for the physical and mental presence of my parents in my life, being there, always showing me how much they love me.

One of the more beautiful things I observed about Korean families, both rich and poor, was how intimate and close they can be to one another. It did make me think and wonder very much how much I had missed not being brought up in Korea. Some nights it made me very sad that I never had the chance to be close to my own birth family, and that I did not have any choice or say in their decision to send me away. But at the same time, I could not disregard the fact that I already have a very loving family back at home in the United States who have always loved me unconditionally and will continue to do so until the day God separates us.

reason is that it brought me closer to my family and made me appreciate my life in the United States. Also, I learned so much about my "ghost country of Korea" culturally that made me understand more about why adoption is considered the best option for some families. As part of the tour, we were taught about the whole process of adoption in Korea, and we had an experience to see it first hand to make it more real for us.

Another reason for the importance of this trip is that I found Mrs. Kim, the woman who brought me to the Bookboo police box.

It turned out that in my adoption file, they had the original Bookboo police box report and in that report was Mrs. Kim's full name. When I visited the police station, I asked them to look her up. We found her. After my social worker contacted her, she said she wanted to meet with me.

I arranged with the social workers and the tour program to meet with her the very next day. I immediately called my mom and dad and told them I would soon meet with her. They were very happy and excited for me. I wished that they could be with me for the meeting. I had so many anxieties about meeting her but I also knew that I would forever regret it if I didn't do it.

Through her, I found out the whole truth about what happened to me. I learned that Mrs. Kim is my birth father's eldest brother's wife -- my aunt on my birth father's side by marriage. The day we met, I could tell as I walked through the door that she was carrying a ton of guilt. The look on her face told me that she thought I was going to resent her for giving me up. But I didn't resent her in the least.

In fact, my emotions were of extreme happiness to finally be able to see her and hold her hand. I immediately burst into tears as I saw her for the first time and I just grabbed her and held her tight. She too was very tearful, telling me in Korean, 'you have the same big eyes that you did when you were little.' She kept touching my arm and my hair, sizing me up and down every second. She couldn't let go of my hand. I felt like that small child all over again, all I wanted to do was be held by her like she used to when I was a toddler. All I could do was cry out all of my emotions of frustration for the past 23 years -- always wondering who I am and who did I come from? I wanted to be close to her and get to know her, but it was very difficult because of the language barrier. We had two social workers translating for us so she was eventually able to tell me everything.

After our meeting I went upstairs to clear my thoughts and I saw a triangle of birds that flew over the tops of the trees. I took that as a sign from God, that He planned things this way and I said a prayer to thank Him for answering my pleas.

What happened to me 23 years ago is a very difficult story to share, but here is a brief summary. My birth father and birth mother were married when they had me, and during their marriage my birth father was never home. He was always out and ended up with another woman. He also never gave my birth mother any money for living expenses. He would bring her some bare necessities from time to time. She became pregnant with my younger sister and things became very difficult. She did not have any family at the time, so she left me at my birth father's mother's home in the middle of the night while I was sleeping and never said a word to anyone.

I was then placed with my aunt and uncle because he is the eldest son and the eldest son is responsible for the entire family. My aunt, Mrs. Kim, cared for me for about four months and during that period she tried hard to get him to take responsiblity for me but it always fell upon her in the end. Her family at the time was very poor so she could not take me in as her own.

I was told by her that my birth father passed away ten years ago, and he maintained a very distant relationship with his side of the family since his divorce from my birth mother. They did, however, find me on the family registry along with my birth mother.

Now I have my birth mother's name, and I am trying to locate her and let her know that I am waiting to meet her again. The process is very long, very slow, and it's hard to be patient when I am so close to finding her.<

Through this search, and during my trip to Korea, I have been turning my thoughts to God more often, and I am beginning to trust in Him a little more each day. I think I have a cookie cutter image of being a Christian. I am very afraid if I commit myself to God fully that I will fail. The fear of failure and rejection is still a very big thing to overcome, even when it comes to God's promises. I know that I have a long journey ahead of me in discovering my past, present and future. In that journey, I hope to overcome my fears and replace them with hopes and dreams to walk with the Lord some day, in trust and at peace.

Jo Rankin

Jo Rankin (Jung Im Hong) was born in Inchon in 1967, adopted by caucasian parents in 1969, and raised in San Diego. She is the middle of five children (two are biological, three adopted). She earned a degree in Journalism in 1989, then worked for two PBS stations consecutively. She co-founded the Association of Korean Adoptees (AKA) with SoYun Roe and Basil Zanda in 1994 and co-edited "Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees" with Tonya Bishoff in 1997. Her hobbies include piano, violin, chess, poetry, and collecting Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirts from over 60 cities worldwide.

BIOLOGICAL MOTHER

You tried your best To cut the cord. Destroyed a nest Beyond afford. My fate was filed And soon defined: A lonely child You left behind. Since you and I May never be Together in Reality, Should I go on And try to solve questions which Have since evolved, Or should I quit While I'm ahead And try to do Without, instead? Such simple words For mother's pearl. From me, with love, Your Inchon girl.

IDENTITY

Realizing I Am American first, Not Korean.
Perhaps I am Neither.

EXCHANGE

Born unto two Realities, two cultures: too
different. You and me. Crying silent tears while
trying to Exchange American branches for Korean roots. Is it possible? Maybe.

Karen Eckert

WHO IS KAREN HAE SOON ECKERT?

At approximately 10 days old, I was found at Chungbu Police Station in Seoul. The date was February 21, 1971. There was no written information left with me, so I was given the name "Park Hae Soon". The officials said I looked about 10 days old, so they estimated my birthdate as February 12, 1971. I was placed into City Baby Hospital for the first four months of my life & then I was put into Holt International's foster care program.

I was adopted at age 9 months old and was raised in Danville, California. Growing up with the Eckert family was very natural for me; I never felt "unaccepted" or too different from them. Even though I was Korean and my brothers and parents were white, I didn't feel I stuck out too much. They never made a big issue out of it and to me, they have always been my REAL family.

We would celebrate my "Arrival Day" every year, my second birthday. Mom would make a scrumptious Korean dinner, followed by an American dessert and Korean gifts. I was always very fulfilled with my family and never had a major desire to seek out my roots until I was 23 years old.

I moved to Sacramento when I was 18 to go to college, and five years later, I joined an adult adoptee group. I really enjoyed meeting other adoptees and sharing experiences and being able to empathize with similar feelings and emotions. That has always been very special to me; how I can easily bond with other adoptees just by sharing that common background.

Michael Lorilla

Like most other adoptees, I was the only Asian in a sea of white people. Yet I think that I was one of the lucky ones. I was adopted by an Asian family so my adoption was not made public issue to the outside world. I also had a number of Asian role models so I grew up knowing and appreciating Asian culture.

I still had my issues to deal with at home. Devisive reactions by my father's family led to disbelief of me and my experiences by my immediate family. Not until my father's funeral did they make public what they had privately fully disclosed to me. No apologies given or requested, I was simply satisified to know, and to have my family know, that I was right, I was telling the truth when I told of their torment.

I moved on. I realized that they were motivated by jealousy. It didn't help that dad bragged about his son being a national merit scholar, the awards, the government appointments, the graduate degrees, the salary. My sisters did very well in their lives but they were untouchable. They were his daughters by blood.

I now have a son and I feel so much love and sadness when I hold him.

Ghosts and Broken Mirrors

Every day I walk past a broken mirror

I can't hide it

I've tried to swallow it

It follows me

Everyone knows it belongs to me

I own it, it is mine

It is all I have left

Yet it there for all the world to see

I see in it's reflections Pictures of a me

I never knew existed

Of a life I never had

That continues to haunt me

Jagged broken bits

Cut off without reason

Like short stories

Without a beginning

Lacking a sense of time and place

People demand

But I don't know what to say

I can only think

Of fragments of quickly fading memories

Of ghosts of butterflies

Of webs of spiders silk

Of ties that bind, yet break, yet remain

Of echoes across two worlds

Drowned by the white noise

Fade to White

Scattered

Across the sea

Letters

My mother wrote for me

Complex characters

Delicately designed by this foreign hand

Always to be carried with me

Into this foreign land

Studying

Each characteristic, each clue

For insight

From the reminders

From the remains

Of a past I once knew

Bleached, torn and swallowed

Too faint to be read

Too distant to be understood

Too far to be heard

Her words, my memories

Melted by the tears

Obscured by the sea

Fade to white

Steven Haruch

I was born in Seoul in 1974. That's the story, anyway. Oh Young-Chan is the name I was given by a group of strangers who took care of me until I came to the U.S. in December, 1976. The rest you've heard before. My parents and nearly everyone around me was white. Or Euro-American. Or Anglo. There are pictures of the party my mother's co-workers threw to wish her farewell and to welcome the new son she was leaving work to care for. In those pictures, you can see me clinging to the only black woman in the entire office. Beside those pictures, in the scrapbook my mother has kept all these years, there are the many welcome cards sent by family and friends. "Welcome," or "Congratulations," they say, nearly all accompanied by a drawing of a sandy-haired child with blue eyes. These small ironies are well-documented.

When asked if I wanted to go to school on Saturday to study Korean, I said no. I wanted to play football. I wanted to be what nearly every kid wants to be: one of the kids; maybe a star running back someday. Eating dinner at my best friend's house, I was called an "alien," jokingly, by his stepfather. Meaning, jokingly, "an illegal." Sensing my embarrassment, he added, "a little green alien." At some point my classmates at school realized, though they had always know, that we were different, and suddenly this difference became irreconcilable. So I turned from my childhood friends to punk music and the skateboarding culture as it was before it became an "extreme sport."

Through high school and college I wrote poetry because I didn't know what else to do. During this time I wrote a lot of self-pitying poems about, directly or indirectly, being adopted. About being homeless, nameless, without a people, without a sense of self that did not depend on a perspective which would always count me as a foreigner, an immigrant, an alien. That there is both novelty and limitation in writing one's life as an ethnic minority has been duly noted elsewhere. That one must come to the conclusion that the sum of one's life and one's work can be &mdahs; must be -- attributed to and culled from more than a difference in phenotype is a harder lesson to learn.

When I read my poems at the KAAN conference in Los Angeles in 1999, I had several adoptive parents talk to me afterward. I was reminded of the first poetry class I'd ever taken, a weekend workshop with Li-Young Lee and Edward Hirsch at Governors State University in Illinois. On the final day of the weekend there was a farewell reading. I read a poem in which I tried to imagine my birth mother (a trope I've grown tired of hearing worked in nearly identical fashion -- but one which seems necessary to begin writing down the bones). A man came up to me with reddened eyes and asked me what he could do for his adopted son, to keep him from feeling alone, abandoned. I don't remember what I told him. I only remember the look on his face as he walked away, inconsolable.

I've always though that art is not about understanding, but about possibility. What could I have said about my poem that would have made any sense? Everyone is haunted. You go on living and the same question is never quite the same the next time you ask it.

Steven Haruch is currently Acting Instructor in the Department of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. He writes film reviews for the Seattle Weekly, in addition to teaching part-time at a Korean American afterschool program.

Poems by Steven Haruch.

T H E A R G U M E N T F R O M S I M P L I C I T Y

for Kate

The mornings were like this, ah rah jji? Yes: the room filling with light, the shadows draining into the street.

You were trying to teach me to speak, dropping your key from the third story each evening,

and I climbed up to you with only a clumsy language in my mouth. There were days that you came home

needing only a shower, you said, the smell of stacked dishes trailing like a wet string through the narrow hall.

At night we mouthed the talk of those who are barely awake, not a whisper but a low dull hum. Ah rah jji?

Do you know? How our two bodies shone from the lamps along Damen Avenue, proof

that light could rise. And you were lonely, then, for the country I had not seen in twenty years.

L O W

What syllable are you seeking, Vocalissimus, in the distances of sleep? Speak it. --Wallace Stevens

Asleep again, I did not hear the telephone. You were, instead, that girl in the painting who reaches down from her bed to touch the sea.

Which sea, I don't know.

The train. Shaking my head in the turns.

As if I disagreed with what I was dreaming. But I was dreaming I was asleep.

When I wake it's midday and I can still hear you breathing. The telephone beside the bed. Were you dreaming of oranges?

I stayed awake describing them. The cold cratered skin, the peels.

When you go walking inside your sleep, The city will be dim. Your cameras Swaying from your arms. Above, a single star Will be blinking. A cursor, spinning

What seems like slowly over the rooftops. The man inside the star Is taking a picture of the world. Everyone But me, he will say, to the microphones That line his helmet. And below him,

In a Low Earth Orbit, the rocket stages Drift by like clouds. In your dream, the sky is still the sky. Or, it is the sea, having fallen apart to get there.

Poems by Steven Haruch.

S O G I V E M E A C H A N C E A N D I
P R O M I S E I C A N M A K E Y O U S M I L E

Try to paperclip the days together. Memory like a tv rigged with a coathanger. Listen, if you place two microphones just so, certain sounds will disappear, so to speak, from the recording. If a wave is cresting in one and falling in the other. You and me, we canceled each other out and then we'd pull out the diagrams and plan each other's rescue. Then we'd try to sleep and try to wake up while the room was dark and the diodes were spelling out the time. Spend all day trying to stay awake.

People would say, I need validation, and they'd be talking about their cars, trying to remember if they'd parked beneath the rhino or the porpoise on the green level or the brown. Then they'd spiral down down through the garage�'that giant screw drilled into the sidewalk. A simple machine, the screw: distance times time, work times time.

You'd have your head propped against your palm, headphones wired through your sleeve, and you'd stamp receipts all day, or sell tickets while "Caroline No" blared out of your hand in mono. Mondays and Wednesdays you would practice CPR on mannequins, the eyes of which blinked red if you failed to bring them back to life. I came with you once and tried to go unnoticed but your teacher asked me to lie down beneath an overturned conference table, which would take the place of a tractor-trailer. I was supposed to be unconscious but I heard you come rushing into the room. You knelt beside me, and with two fingers on my neck, you turned to your partner and said, He's hurt.

I Â W I S H Â I Â K N E W Â W H A T Â T O Â T E L L Â Y O U

The rain broke its news to the aircraft And spent the afternoon holding to the story About to end above our row of houses, An ugliness painted into the corners. Water spilled through the window onto my shoulders, The lights dimming from the storm outside.

I saw you, or thought I did, standing outside Trembling like the wings of an aircraft With nowhere to land, your shoulders Pulled in. You shouted, "I've got a story To tell you soon," your hands at the corners Of your mouth. Between the houses

Your voice kept at it, or instead, the houses Kept at your voice, though it stayed outside Long enough for you to give up, and from the corner's Grayish angle you took off. The aircraft Carrier was in port, and you were to write the story Of how it nearly sank near one of Atlas's shoulders,

In that other hemisphere full of dark shoulders And smallish straw-covered houses. I didn't bother calling down from the second story Just to tell you I hadn't been outside In twenty-seven days. The aircraft That nearly drowned you out were at the corners

Of my eyes, and the carrier, returned from the corners Of the earth, needed you. The highway shoulders Were jammed with cars, the bright aircraft Dipping their wings. All across town, the houses Prepared for their sailors, welcomes home hung outside. But they don't remember how to live on land; the story

That would make you famous, you said, was not a story At all, but a collection: the folded corners Of a hundred sailors' diaries, written outside The official recordÃ'how each shoulders A separate desire for the sea, for the houses Of childhood, for the deck and its eager aircraft.

But you are a different story, your thin shoulders, Your glasses chipped at the corners. Now the houses Are all dark. Outside: the rain, the distant roar of aircraft.