Cancer

 

 
 
 
Feet on dashboard, god-awful music blaring from mixed

cassette tapes, my father let me have my way as he played

 

chauffeur, never easing his grip on the wheel down straightaways.

Four hours to my college dorm across New Jersey and the Poconos,

 

up through Scranton to the gulch of Broome County in upstate

New York, not a word passed between us, mile after

 

mile markers on fence posts, yellow dashes, streaks of trees—

blurred liturgy of autumn, spring.  Summer into winter into

 

summer, ticking off hours that measured the distance as he drove

and I watched the road that held nothing but our widening gulf.

 

My father taught me willful reticence, folding desire

into cellular spaces.  Perhaps one day I will enter this dusty

 

warehouse filled with neglected boxes, find the one labeled

“For My Daughter” and unpack its long-held secrets.  For now, I let

 

him seal their seams with tape, stuff them into corners.  Recently

when I visited, he sat across the dinner table as Mom prepared

 

our holiday meal, both of them aging exponentially like radioactive

particles.  Wisp of his former self, barely recognizable, recited

 

the Lord’s Prayer: Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 

 

They had just taken out his kidney: the half.

Life of failure.  Suddenly he opened his eyes, looked straight

 

into me and said, I know you, you have a frontier spirit.  Where did he

even get that word: frontier.  We nodded in agreement, then ate

 

in silence like we always do, losing our nerve.  All I’ve ever wanted

him to say is: tell me something.  Tell me everything.
 
 
 

 

Su Hwang was recently awarded the 2016-17 Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant made possible by the Loft Literary Center and Jerome Foundation, juried by members of VONA. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she grew up in New York then moved to San Francisco before transplanting to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota, where she received her MFA in Poetry. She is also the recipient of the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship in Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. Several of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Drunken Boat, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, and Poets.org. Su currently lives in Minneapolis.