April 2020
1.
The bald truth was that my father first saw
the coronavirus as a blessing.
The grocery had never been busier.
On the phone,
he listed the debts he paid off.
He ate raw elephant garlic
by the bulb, the premium kind
he swore by.
Let me ship a case
to your studio in Astoria —
as though the enemy
were a vampire in plain sight,
and he dared it to a feeding.
2.
The old lesson: you can’t save
a father who refuses to be saved.
His hospitalization, a vacation —
he has no choice now but to rest.
3.
My VP offers, Anything you need.
Remember: PR, not ER.
I confirm I know she means it.
In my gracious refusal,
I recognize my appetite for more work.
I help sell solutions to salespeople
who sell drugs to doctors
who sell them to patients.
I tell myself I am making a difference.
Between correcting documents,
I call the hospital. The staff
answer my questions as though
they’re being watched.
It must be something in my tone.
A white-hot exactingness.
A dashboard tracks the infected
with a map pinned with a scarlet constellation
of which my father is part.
Like a star, he has cooled into an idea.
I cannot recall his body or trace
the shape of his suffering.
What I need is certainty:
How many liters of nasal cannula?
What percent oxygenation saturation?
4.
Someone always has to mind the store.
For four hours straight on a Saturday
I stand clacking at the register,
he tips of my latex gloves black
from rubbing coins and dollar bills.
The younger me would have bragged
about my competence.
Look, Appa, I am a machine!
The shelves are the barest they’ve ever been.
Death has made spendthrifts of us all —
even the truffle oils have sold out.
5.
In the news, famous Americans
discuss the origin of the virus,
which is non-American.
A senator quotes Whitman
with characteristic emotion
to appeal to our collective Americanness:
I am large, I contain multitudes.
To the customers at the store,
I respond, I am not Chinese
with the same confidence
as when I inform them,
This melon is from California.
This peach is American.
6.
On his desk:
a landline cord yanked from its wall,
a jelly jar of tea polluted with garlic bits.
7.
The nurse warns that he has stopped
making sense. Could it be
COVID’s final trick?
Don’t cry, my father says in Korean,
a gentle order.
So, this is where forgiveness begins,
just as the Buddhist parable promises–
the young mother who,
after failing to find a single house untouched by death
and surrendering her dead boy to the forest,
appears before the Buddha,
her grief finally calmed, with upraised palms
free of mustard seeds,
like my naked hands now, paling to light in the sun,
the pines and cumulus pixelating in this neural world I am awakening to–
spring.
8.
Father has returned, marked
with the humility and innocence of someone
spared by a miracle.
What happened to me?
I can hear his breath on the phone,
like a book fanning apart
on its spine for the first time.
In my retelling,
he is a man, not a god.
I am his daughter.
I beg him,
Appa, you can save yourself.
And he listens.
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Excerpted from The Corrected Version by Rosanna Young Oh. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Diode Editions.
