24-hour bathhouse

steam-flushed water is voltaic on bare skin

                and stirs baked egg shells in my throat and knotted tongue,

wearing away fragments of inner city daegu from my

                pellucidly stripped ears: bustled subways buried beneath

dilated voices in satoori, our people’s dialect, curved and

                strung-along in the same unqualified way you would nail

a thick-rinded tangerine. dead skin cells form assemblages

                on green-gloved body scrubs, rubbing against bodies

withering in overnight work shifts and drenched perspiration.

                old women, little girls stamp their bare feet along tubs and stools,

sing-songing nursery rhymes and folk tales my ears are

                no longer able to grapple. they don’t know of blue-tinted

humiliation, of keeping tender flesh free of strangers, those who

                nestle themselves thousands of light years from their bloodline.

i am envious, budding girl who knows only of red-drizzled

                abashment, of pressing her chest close to bathroom-tile walls

with her back turned against water. i prefer colder tubs,

                small swimming pools, currents that slip past nudity with ease.

when towels on the heads of other girls my age

                curl the shape of lamb ears, mine creases like

paper frogs. sometimes, when peripheral daegu rings

                like late twilight in my ears, i soften the frogs and mend them

into swans and flamingos the way my origami teacher once

                taught me. often, though, i let them hover above bathtub water,

static gushing along their hips and backbones.