The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones

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Kentucky Daydreams

my father first met my mother
down an earthen path
on the edges of songtan
we moved states every few years
after her death, running wherever
he thought he could build
a church and prosper, propelled by
his new wife, white, yes,
with a white son of her own
and the only one who didn’t match
was me

but it’s those brisk kentucky nights i think of
when i tell stories from my childhood,
of hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids
the luminescence of fireflies
smeared across our foreheads,
our cheeks, where i watched
meteor showers alone on the roof
and slept in the hammock outside
when the fighting downstairs
was too loud for dreaming

the fields beside our house were spun
into hay every autumn, and behind us
the deep wood full of caves where I could hide



and be my mother’s child again
imagining that the roots of the cedars
spread all the way to her grave in wawbeek
and that the water from the creeks i waded in
would find their way to the oceans
turn to steam
cradle us both in the clouds
and fall again
on the mountains of korea

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