Little Matrons
slumped in the crook of a nook, bereft
of lullabies and apple pie, playing duck duck
goose with my mind to find the smallest child
nested inside another then another until I
ring around the rosie back to myself. This
recess is cold. It’s like everyone vamoosed
to get to America first. Hello, what if we didn’t
want to go? All that’s left is an echo and a
banshee I hardly know. Some people say
hypnosis or past life regression therapy may
help, but I locked this chamber for a reason.
Ate the key. What is the shape of memory
that needs to be forgotten? Yet a voice keeps
calling: Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me
Copyright © 2022 by Su Hwang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 24, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“For as long as I can remember, I can’t remember the first eight years of my life in Korea before my family immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s. Inspired by nesting dolls and the sonics of nursery rhymes, this sonnet is an attempt to reconcile a lost childhood and the lingering voices that reverberate from the wounded inner child in all of us—the persistence of buried trauma, along with the fear of peeling back layers of memory and their meanderings.”
—Su Hwang
Su Hwang
Su Hwang is a Korean American poet and the author of Bodega (Milkweed Editions, 2019).