{"id":4642,"date":"2017-01-16T20:20:39","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T20:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4642"},"modified":"2017-01-22T17:09:28","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T17:09:28","slug":"monica-sok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4642","title":{"rendered":"STORY OF GENERATIONS & POEM – Monica Sok"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the courtyard of a temple where an ancient tree blooms<\/p>\n

an old woman is waiting to greet you.<\/p>\n

She locks her fingers. You step into her hands.<\/p>\n

Lengthen your body. Your feet on her shoulders.<\/p>\n

Another woman (not much younger than you) climbs<\/p>\n

over your bodies, plants her toes on your shoulders,<\/p>\n

for the next woman, younger, skinnier, growing hips.<\/p>\n

She helps the younger children board the human rope,\u00a0<\/p>\n

almost toppling, if not for the old woman at the base,<\/p>\n

\n

Up in the leaves. And the two-year-old, just learning to walk,<\/p>\n

dangles in the middle cluster of teens, who offer their long arms<\/p>\n

and cupped hands. Because the two-year-old is carrying<\/p>\n

the baby just born. The others tell her not to cry<\/p>\n

while she presses her face to the baby\u2019s cheeks.<\/p>\n

Go up the six-year-old says. Up here! says the five-year-old.<\/p>\n

The toddler above plops the thumb out of her mouth,<\/p>\n

offering her hand, another presses her sweaty palms to the bark,<\/p>\n

reaches for a branch. But the old woman trembles at the base,<\/p>\n

and breathing heavily, drops to her knees. The tower collapses,<\/p>\n

your foot stuck under roots growing through the stone floor.<\/p>\n

All the girls fall\u2014some even cling to the boughs\u2014but the baby.<\/p>\n

Somehow the baby found a nest on a branch.<\/p>\n

Later, when the old woman begins to disappear, you tell her<\/p>\n

you saw the tree lower its branch,<\/p>\n

to catch the falling cry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

FRAGILITY<\/strong>
\n <\/p>\n

We decided to ask for our money back,
\nwe women of color.
\nSo we wrote a formal letter to the league of straight white men.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t remember exactly what we said
\nbut it was like filing a complaint to the manager
\nabout some sandwich we ate,
\nthe poor quality of a show
\nwe had anticipated seeing for months
\nonly to be disappointed. But it was something
\nmore serious, like collateral.
\n <\/p>\n

I half-expected the straight white men to ignore our request,
\nif not take a whole year to reply,
\nor perhaps never get our letter in the mail
\nor even better, lose it
\n\u2014denying having ever received it.
\n <\/p>\n

The straight white men wrote back immediately,
\nthough it wasn\u2019t the main person we addressed, who wrote back.
\nIt was his roommate or some friend sleeping on their couch
\nwhom they lazily assigned this task.
\nWasting no time, they gave us a Visa gift card of $5 from Target,
\nto reimburse us for the damage done.
\nAnd their letter was way more formal than ours,
\nwith the proper, stuffy language
\nand copyrights of things I didn\u2019t even know we were talking about,
\ntheir words full of legal accuracy and politeness.
\n <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more is that they made the mistake of calling us
\n\u201cWomen of Color, Inc.\u201d as though we were an organization.
\nBut this was unnecessary
\nbecause we didn\u2019t call ourselves that.
\n <\/p>\n

\"\"Monica Sok is a 2016-2018 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Year Zero was selected by Marilyn Chin for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review,<\/em> Virginia Quarterly Review<\/em>, Narrative<\/em>, and the New Republi<\/em>c, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. She is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the courtyard of a temple where an ancient tree blooms an old woman is waiting to greet you. She locks her fingers. You step into her hands. Lengthen your body. Your feet on her shoulders. Another woman (not much younger than you) climbs over your bodies, plants her toes on your shoulders, for the [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2432,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[234],"class_list":["post-4642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-art-akino-kondah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4642"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4679,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4642\/revisions\/4679"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}