Rosanna Young Oh: “Hide-and-Seek”

Hide-and-Seek

Rosanna Young Oh

Whose hallways and bedrooms, whose tunnels and fields? Ahead, father-shadows stain the walls, blocking my exit. A fly zooms by with the crack of a bullet. I lower my body into a Cloroxed bathtub to play dead, dulled like a good daughter. My brother slips into the night, as he is used to. From the kitchen, the sound of knife against bone, metal scraping metal. Then silence comes. I go searching: Brother, brother, all clear! And he emerges, hungry. Home is Home because where else is there. At eighteen, he lives in Quantico among brothers and sisters who do not look like him. At least here, he says on the phone, they expect nothing. I finally find him at the kitchen table, a soldier eating a Big Mac with extra pickles, extra sauce, and store-bought cheesecake. A darkness from another darkness. Let me be clear: my brother is not lost, but where is the boy decked in shadow? If I disappear into that same silence, can I reach him before the pull-ups and the afterwards?

how did this poem begin for you?

The poem began with a childhood memory of hide-and-seek that has stayed with me for decades. After one particularly long game, I finally found my brother hiding in plain sight, sitting with our parents and their friends at the kitchen table, pretending to drink. Years later, as my family and I watched him graduate from the Naval Academy and serve in the Marines—with both pride and some bittersweetness—I kept returning to that image of my brother as a boy acting as an adult.

Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version, which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award. She works in corporate marketing and currently teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York, CUNY.

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