By Hee-June Choi

after the Korean War

Asphalt covered half the street; the rest was
overgrown with sunberries we ate. At the sound of a horn,
we ran to the car; in its bluish smoke, we saw
our future like a 3-D film. When my friend

JC tied his feet to the back bumper of a jeep
to sneak a ride, its engine started;
market people screamed as his bleeding head
was dragged for a hundred yards.

Our most daring venture was to the mountain cave
to dig out bullets for spinning tops’ axles.
But we had to cross locals’ territory––my forehead
still bears the scar of a thrown stone.

These road brawls ended when someone
in the cave shouted: Corpses!—soldiers in a mass grave.
Yet, those were carefree days. Dropping by any house
at mealtime, I ate with them if they laid me a place

—if not, I played next to their dinner table.
House doors were left unlocked:
what thief would steal an empty bag of rice?
In summer, we slept in the public pool’s storage shack,

no parents looking for us.
It was the children’s utopia: what we didn’t have,
we didn’t need. Even now, walking my suburban street
late at night, I snoop around for remnants of those days:

that sour tailpipe smoke must be a shimmer
in the air somewhere on Earth.

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Hee-June Choi is the author of three poetry books in Korea. His work has appeared in Korean poetry magazines and journals and in JoongAng Daily, a top-three newspaper by circulation, in Korea. Since retiring from the semiconductor industry, his poetry has been published Pleiades, The American Journal of Poetry, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Red Wheelbarrow.