when stream slithered down the hill like a dirge

By Juheon Rhee

my grandmother, picking snake berries by the mountain road, stopped— to wash her face in the muddy water, that left her face glistening. it sang to us: trickle, trickle, little star, on a starless night, diverging and converging, until its body was no longer a snake, but one of a nine-tailed fox.  

until the hill steepens and the stream vomits onto the rocks far below, the ground breaks and the organs of the stream splatter like confetti. father sets the camping chair, fishing rope in his hand, dreams of insomnia as the night deepens, while the blood of the lake supplies the veins of the mountain and valleys below.

water, it crawls on its thirty legs like a centipede, and paves a path my child would walk, then becomes one with the wave, a tower of lies that comes crashing down. the ocean breathes like a eulogy at an empty funeral, apologizes, as it dresses my child’s body in thousands of plastics. her, unbeknownst to it all, screams in delight, jumping up and down onto the hazy, fishless water.