KATIE KIM

Survival Song

for Grandfather 

Kwangju, 1980 

three hours, twenty-seven bus stops.
twenty-seven breaths caught in a haze
of diesel, each brake squealing a change

in key. three hours, by train: warbling 
past rice paddies, smokestacks bending 
in the wind. how could you have known 

where you were heading, a city better 
known as a police state. your friends were
silenced into myth for doodling Chun’s face 

onto posters. you told your parents it was 
just a school field trip: no talk of streets 
rinsed in sirens, no mention of cruisers 

beating the pavement until it was quiet 
& the unknowing sway of your shoulders 
brushed into the bus aisle. you were 

only 23, fresh from the service, trekking 
from the center of korea to its outskirts. 
three hours & the sound of explosives 

hardening from drumbeat into the will 
to fight. so you fastened 
your neon orange bandana around

your forehead & fought–you fought
until it glistened with sweat, bright
as the tangerines Grandma carried home

from the grocery store. now, years after  
your right leg broke 
mid-sprint, your limp has become the way 

we know you. we hear you
coming–a beloved off-rhythm, a syncopation 
against the state’s. against the voices 

of your friends—six hundred more—
stolen by tyranny, but your bandana held 
its color like a chord to the government’s ear.

you paved the path to democracy, stone
by stone, note by note, until the city
awakened its survivors with its song. 

Katie Kim is a student attending Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. As a writer, she is particularly interested in poetry and realistic fiction. Her work has previously appeared in SWWIM, Connecticut River Review, Crashtest, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, the Advanced Ellipsis Writing Workshop, and the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program. As well as creative writing, Katie enjoys visual art and playing the oboe.