SmokeLong Quarterly

On an island called Jeju, barnacled women pull cockle and seaweed up from the sea earth.

It is generational–grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and mothers all learning to breathe underwater, lungs long pillowed by salted air. They croon a language that is whistle, signs, and buzz.

The first time I talk back to my father, my mother teaches me how to take my fight out on the brick of our front steps, just like she did against the walls of her own father’s first Astoria apartment. She tells me concrete and stone are the best conductors of anger, nothing like the soft, feather down of our puffed out pillows.

In a borough called Queens, vestigial girl flounder and mermaid mothers pound ssal by the cracked petal whites of their knuckles. My mother says that when I was born, I came out whistling and I came out with her own clubbed thumbs and she shows me now how to keep them curled outside of my folded fists.

This is how to never snap a bone, she says, This is how to breathe under this roof.