Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula

Franny Choi

Your country's memory is short. But know this:   We can still hear the planes, their death-knell hum—            We live, have been living, with this threat    circling our heads like we were carrion,                        staining the earth we still call home    despite the pictures, which know only how                      to mark what happened. The choices    to tell one truth at a time. Our names were                      made in the dry mouths of children,    napalm, ravaged paddies, lung cancer. Names,              sewn straight into our breasts. We live—   like ghosts, reverberate. The bad memories                              have to live somewhere. Why not   in the body? They climb to the surface,                               smother doubt to save the family   from war's muck. War: the only surname                 we're responsible for. The only sunlight   on our unmarked graves. Our sustenance                           is this story spun from the records,   amid your savage freeze. So we married fear,     and we've taken its name as our own. Yes, we  salvaged these small lives. We're free, at least, to            sob and shudder, yes, and feed our babies,  remember the acrid clouds we dripped from,                                    and cling to them—as if we're the bad ones—for dear, stupid life.

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Qurissy Lopez

Franny Choi is the author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry; and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). They co-edited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books, 2024) alongside Terisa Siagatonu, Noʻu Revilla, and Bao Phi, and their writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge. Their debut essay collection, We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg,is forthcoming from Ecco Press in fall 2026.

The Paris Review

Spring 2019

New York, New York

Editor
Emily Stokes

Managing Editor
Kelly Deane McKinney

Poetry Editor
Srikanth Reddy

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Since its founding 1953, The Paris Review has been America’s preeminent literary quarterly, dedicated to discovering the best new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Review’s renowned Writers at Work series of interviews is one of the great landmarks of world literature. Hailed by the New York Times as “the most remarkable interviewing project we possess,” the series received a George Polk Award and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. With the December 2016 redesign of the Review’s website, the complete digital archive of everything we’ve published since 1953 is available to subscribers. In November 2017, the Review gave voice to nearly sixty-five years of writing and interviews with the launch of its first-ever podcast, featuring a blend of classic stories and poems, vintage interview recordings, and new work and original readings by the best writers of our time.

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