Many Saints

un.
at lunchtime—a place of toppling platters & sesame
buns—there is a woman nearby with her small daughter,
who is bent over crayons, chopsticks,& tear-drops, unaware & dreamy.

i pretended i didn’t notice the woman was sobbing, so very
quietly, & that no one, not even she, had even looked up. why
do we deny strangers a measure of comfort while they’re still living?

deux.
in the after life do you now know how i forgot to call you a day
before you died, & that i didn’t help this mother? maybe i’ll be seeing you
alive in strangers. or maybe i don’t want to see you in another.

but this woman reminded me of the may crownings back
in catholic school & how unhappy mary seemed, even surrounded by flowers.
her viney crown bleeding endlessly over bowls of steaming pho.

trois.
i’d still like to think that the god-who-gives loaned your lost
spirit to the mother sitting in that restaurant to save her from
her sins, or that you yourself could reach out to give her even one folded napkin.

do you still make soufflé, & are you tired of hearing from me every single day
in cold december, when everything freezes harder? i’d really like
to think you’re just belly-laughing at all my jokes, somewhere in wild wyoming

quatre.
why does god take & take from us, to leave us alone & quiet?
you must be alive, attending midnight mass in a 600 year-old church
instead of dying. but then i feel how silent paris is & know that you are gone.

your mom told me they had christmas out last year without
you, as if full tables fill the spaces you left undone. as if silences & lavender
& dogeared baby pictures don’t make her miss her son.

cinq.
so i think there must be as many saints as there are stars or
strangers, out there in the dark to hear our dusky prayers. either that
or there’s a god-who-gives, who eases even the faithless’s cares at christmas time.

but if faith itself is in the act of being alone, are saints
those strangers who other strangers see & aid? or are they just
the strangers that struggle alone & quietly, placed like flowers on a grave?

Hyun-Joo Kim is a Korean adoptee & Ph.D. student of African History at The Ohio State University. She has completed ethnographic fieldwork and Kiswahili language competency in Arusha (TZ), Dar es Salaam (TZ), and Stone Town, Zanzibar, as well as archival fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia and Frankfurt, Germany. She has poems either published or scheduled for publication in Poets Reading the News, eris & eros, Rising Phoenix Review, Visible Magazine, and Collision Literary Magazine. Email her (mooney.196@osu.edu) or follow her on Twitter (@hyun_joo_kim).