There is Nothing Else
Today, my friends had their first child. During the pregnancy,
I had teased them, suggesting that they name her after me.
July 14th is her birthdate, Bastille Day, day of revolution and new beginnings.
This is good, I say aloud, to no one in particular.
My nephew Frankie was born on the 17th of September, 2005, in Boston.
His Germanic name means free man. On the same day in 1630, the Puritans
settled on a name for their new home, after Boston, England.
And on September 17th of 1862, at Antietam, more blood was shed
than in any American military battle since. Frankie died on March 30th, 2017.
All I know about that day is that it rained without stopping. There is nothing else.
The bloodiest battles of our lives have been fought before, by our mothers,
or by strangers we have never met, in lands we may not recognize.
The names of towns where we raise our children first belonged to others,
across an ocean, on land that for one reason or another, ceased to be home.
Boston, Massachusetts, was first Boston, Lincolnshire.
Birmingham, Michigan, the town where I first started asking too many questions,
and where my father fixed cars beside his father, was first Birmingham, England.
When he left us, he wrote in his goodbye note, that he had to leave before
he hurt someone: I was going to kill my dad, or myself. I remember reading it
and wondering, if he considered adding or you but instead
put the pen down, before backing the Cadillac out of our driveway for the last time.
My friends tell me that they came up with a name for their daughter that will
belong only to her. Can that ever really be true? I close my eyes and whisper
her name the way I used to say my prayers in the dark.
Today in history, a child took her first breath. She opened her eyes.
There is nothing else.
Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial (Korean/Caucasian) second generation American in recovery. She grew up in Michigan and South Korea, and now lives near New Haven, Connecticut. Her poems have been published or are upcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Fem, Rise Up Review, Black Napkin Press, Dying Dahlia Review, The Missing Slate, Vagabond City Lit, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Literary Mama, Easy Street, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.