“My Mother” by Patty Paine

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.              for So Nyo Kim
In traditional literature, a beautiful woman, called So Nyo descends from heaven in search of a fuller life on earth. She marries an earthling, becomes a mother, and fulfills the chores expected of every married woman. She would then go back up to her former abode in heaven. There is no reference to what became of her after her return to heaven.

—A Handbook of Korea

The Sounding Machine by Patty PaineI.

My mother had skin smooth
like stones worn
by the passing of water.
Her hair was black and coarse,
and she wore glasses
that on her face looked
like huge butterfly wings.

During the Korean War she lay
very still in a ditch among dead
bodies, the stench filled her
nose and throat, but she hid there
long after the threat had passed.

When she crawled from the ditch
she found a girl folded over
her mother screaming
mommy please wake up.
mommy please wake up.

II.

My mother didn’t see me
crouched behind the door.
I watched her wildly
whirling and spinning
her hands spread like fans
she danced and danced
until her legs buckled
and she sunk to the floor.
With tears coursing down her
face she crawled to the couch
and she lay there
for a long, long time.

–Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine (2012)
Accents Publishing

Previous posts about The Sounding Machine and Patty Paine:

Patty PainePatty Paine is the author of Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is assistant director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

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