It’s the girl with the bowl cut & red bandana chasing hope in the truck’s exhaust fumes losingherself around the corner. It’s my auntyoung & running into the future. It’s my aunt naked & roped on the military truckbody bled & bruised into a red & blue taegeuk.Maybe it’s her brother across the barricade beating breath out of bodies. Green bootsimprinting maps to afterlife onto necks. Not a brotherfor now. For now, soldier. For now, Korea. For now, kill & then pray it wasn’t your sister.Is that a red bandana?Lost between fragmented taxi cabs shattered glass & legs with no destinationcornering you into the city. No exitout of this mess. Your mess. Your people. Your city built from your ashes.Your city stripped bare like a winter tree& clubbed into a past. It’s my aunt fighting. Voice fractured. Skin splattered.Is it my auntover there, one of the people buried in flags? History doesn’t remember faces.
Your City
in memory of the Gwangju Uprising
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Reprinted with permission from i cut my tongue on a broken country by Kyo Lee (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025).
Kyo Lee is a writer from Waterloo, Canada and Gwangmyeong, South Korea. She is the author of the poetry collection i cut my tongue on a broken country (Arsenal Pulp Press). She was a winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her work also appears in Narrative, Nimrod, Prism, The Forge, and This Magazine, among others. She is currently studying, or not studying, at Yale College. She has a love-hate relationship with summer, improv baking, and poetry. You can visit her at kyolee.me.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
Kyo Lee's intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.
"i cut my tongue teems with contrast: rebellious energies of electric flights crash into questions about forgiveness and repair. Kyo Lee presents readers with a bewitchingly noir portrait—burning with imagery of drowned cities, archetypal families, lovers, teeth, rabbits, snakes, Korean mosquitos, and holy water. Lee's romantic, hungering speakers are often surprised by their own liminality: 'i forgot the weight of my own spine in the water,' as memories interrupt with the force of their own pulsing agendas."
—Sun Yung Shin
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