Gold
- Gold
I've becomethe kind of creature who, on Sundays,fills seven small boxes with a bevy of pills
to stick it out another week.When will I be fixed enoughto hear my kid scream without tearing
my father's phantom hands off me?How do demons, decades gone now,still ravage me? Tell me
I am not the thingmy children will have to survive.Tell me
the mob I inherited will not touchmy son. Yes, the cavalcadeof all that's tried to kill me
may forever raid my brain, but knowthis: in my mother's first language,the word for fracture, for crack,
is the same as the word for gold.Every Thursday for twenty-one monthsbefore my son was born,
a doctor trained me to put the gun downand write. I understandI am one of the lucky ones. [End Page 126]
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books), winner of the 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry and a finalist for both the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications including Ploughshares, North American Review, The Rumpus, the Best New Poets 2010 anthology, and the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, The Frost Place, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
