Yupang Hanna Han’s Mom, You Once Spoke of a River sings forth the garden paths and soupy ghosts and leafy exoskeletons conjured by a talented young poet. Han’s poems dive into the sensory spaces of memory with lyrical precision, startling images, and narrative care. Each line is viscerally felt, vulnerably so: “I carry you in small things: / knuckles that stiffen in winter, / a way of pausing before I speak.” This is a debut from a marvelous poet and I’m so grateful to linger among these poems which traverse such vast distances, daughters, and diasporas. 
   ——Jane Wong, author of Overpour and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

Poem from Mom, You Once Spoke of a River

Shattered Song for Lennon

I longed for the stillness of a river’s bend,
but you brought war, fi st pressed
into the throat of the city—
New York, streets slick with maple,
crimson clinging.

Your love, Lennon, yours and Yoko’s,
was no balm.
It was a raw draft,
unfinished,
fuming in revolt.

Autumn wore its names.
But winter waited.
Its cold a stain in the marrow.

You pulled every cherry, every strawberry Yoko had planted,
ripped them out,
left the earth bruised—
craters in their place,
paper-thin, forgotten.

I could not tend to what you broke.

I turned away from you,
your body a prison of ash,
no form left for tenderness.
I found what was left of me—
buried in the corners
where the “I” once was,
a room swollen with shadows.

The ghosts of Vietnam, limbs twisted by hours,
stirred at my feet.
They murmured nothing.
Their faces dimming into the dust,
their touch cold, a streak down my spine.

Once, you stood there,
a gray hat, a rifle,
rising against the firestorm.

You raised it, slow as thought.
And the bullet hit—
but only part of me fell,
a cherry, its skin split,
its pit swallowed whole.

But not all of me broke.

The part that survived,
it did not forgive,
but it was heavy,
lodged like a stone in the chest.

And I wrote this shattered song for Lennon—
because, even now,
the part that survived insists:
peace is the only thing that endures.