self-portrait as a firefly

by Katie Kim

i.

Mom says, there are trillions of cells inside you

and each one loves you. I try to believe her, but I blame myself

each time I bite my fingernails to blood. Each time

the man idles in his neon yellow Prius too long

at the corner, his eyes holding questions I can’t silence.

Meanwhile, spring lizards map my antennae, their tongues gone

sticky in summer’s moonless dark. She says, even in dark, the body

makes its own light. We are our own moons, peripheral

redness constellating the corners of my sight. Even in downpour, inside

sun-fists thrown like rice into the steam of August. Even then—

my little moon blinks, keeps blinking, keeps lighting

the matchstick of my belly until it softens into sleep.

Even as I sleep, the night owls still watch like mothers.

Last night, when I curled my body into its crescent

of sleep, my mother’s words filled my dreamscape’s

technicolor clouds: ae-gi-ya^[1]  , you were never the world’s

favorite girl—but you do know how to glow. Never lose that.

ii.

Your bedroom door is shut—completely shut. Not even the fists

my father drowned in the frozen lake of the doctor’s silence

could slip through. Is everything okay— through the wood

I couldn’t hear the answer to will i live? These days, I start each day

by peering through the glass window, to see whether you’re whispering

to father, whether the green 50 on the monitor still blinks

its firefly pulse. your head gleams, a skyless moon glowing through

the turban that once held your brown ponytails I tied before

school, giggling through the wind. I’m old enough to know

the transparent tube trailing across your chest may not lift you

from the white-sheeted bed. It may not twist your doorknob

with the same strong grip you once used to lift me when I sailed

on your shoulders through the sea of chirping sparrows, their songs

overpowered by a family who never stopped talking, long before

we chose silence over the question burning our tongues. Now, the door

stays closed. I press my forehead to the glass, watching my reflection

tremble yours. outside, the june sun hums. Inside, I imagine us lying

beneath it, passing cookie dough between us: one spoon, your eyes

brushing the tumor in your breast away for just one day. I tell myself

it’s possible the body is a lantern—that light only shifts, from room

to room, quieting. Even as yours dims, I keep blinking, keep lighting

the matchstick of my belly, waiting to answer you wherever you’re led.

^[1] Baby in Korean

---

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.