Katharine Chung is a writer and librarian. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her poetry has previously been published in Down in the Dirt, Italics Mine, The Word’s Faire, Wildroof Journal, and forthcoming in Innisfree (March 2026) . Find her on Instagram @vegancinephile.
The Path
“Perhaps a path to consider,”
the mother of one of
my childhood friends
and former middle school dance teacher
good-naturedly tells me in response to
the social media post I share
after my father’s passing.
She is talking about writing,
despite the fact that I am now
middle aged
with a pension and career.
I shouldn’t feel anger,
and I recognize her
words as a compliment.
“Oh,” I think,
“But it comes at such a high cost,”
not unlike the high school
English teacher suggesting that
I sequester in the Midwest
for four years and write in college,
citing my gift as if it were
an instantaneous ticket
to a fulfilling and balanced life.
Yes, I present well,
for all intents and purposes,
and my sense of humor in storytelling
has the tendency to bring levity
to difficult situations.
This is the beginning,
my ability as a child to discern tension
in chaotic family gatherings,
my gut telling me when people
have stopped listening,
or when the best time is to interject.
It is my walking into an unfamiliar house
and feeling the loss or tragedy
that occurred there,
my ability to sense
my mother’s mood and
know when she craves quiet.
And while I recognize the gift,
it is also a charge,
sometimes even a burden,
the wanting to illuminate
what seems so apparent and yet failing,
like applying color forms to a laminated page
and watching them slide off,
the page dried up from
too many applications,
too many indecisions.
And then there is the anxiety,
the black sheep that no one talks about,
the mad woman in the attic
hidden away from the others,
all of whom agreed to marry well.
It is the trembling that starts for me
on the first day of second grade,
my mother reading me a passage of
Beverly Cleary and my suddenly noticing
a certain repetition of words,
like a chant,
that triggers something inside
my stomach,
before the bottom falls out
and I suddenly feel
as though I am falling.
I spent that entire night on
our living room couch,
my body shaking and
my legs sore from the
adrenaline of
running an invisible
marathon.
I hear my grandmother
coming up the wooden stairs,
“What’s wrong with her?”
and my mother,
recognizing in me what she
hoped not to pass on, but
knowing that the seed
was planted long ago
and is only now
breaking through
the surface.
The irony, I would learn,
when the words that sustain you
can also fracture you.
It is the anxiety that blinds my small body
not yet diagnosed with migraines,
by the fluorescent lights of
my classroom day in and day out,
the small area of my stomach beginning
to erode like an old battery.
“Be a Viking,” my mother says as I tearfully
leave each morning, her knowing
instinctively that I would need
to build resilience to survive in this world.
And then the tragedies begin to hit,
my father leaving and grandfather dying the same year,
my embarrassing admission to my mother
that I soiled my bed for the first
and only time in my life
after dreaming that I saw
not my grandfather in the pine casket,
but my elusive father,
my seeing his face
as he is lowered underground.
The body feels not only our loss,
but yours as well,
and tries to reconcile through words,
a Herculean effort
akin to organizing
a global general strike.
It is the secondary anxiety
that comes when you are forced
to show up daily, year after year,
even after gaining thirty pounds
because of the medication that saves your life,
a last resort when you can’t seem
to leave your bed after your father
forgets your sixteenth birthday,
the medication stifling your neurotransmitters,
as though you can never again
find the correct word.
“But I have already taken the path,” I want to say,
Because it is not something
that you choose to follow like a trail.
It is there, no matter what,
despite the best house of cards
that you could possibly stack for yourself.
If there is vulnerability or pain, you will see it.
Where there is sadness, you will feel it.
You may need to excuse yourself from meetings,
your vision will turn red when you see hypocrisy,
you will see your friends and families underneath
their most ornate masks,
you may need props or tasks
to shepherd you through social gatherings,
you will try to pacify the longing with
food or drink or smoke,
knowing even as you sink
into the delicious gluttony
that you will not be sated.
And where there is no time, you will find it.
You will get up hours before sunrise,
or stay awake in the deepest pockets of the night.
You will show up to work bleary eyed,
but with internal purpose.
And you will be surrounded
by a world who seems
to always be focused
on a different area of the landscape,
their pupils narrowing like
you would turn a telephoto lens on
suitors, investments,
wedding invitations,
party dresses, children’s names,
credit card rewards,
restaurant recommendations,
school districts, home renovations,
furniture, shopping,
disingenuous philanthropy work,
and other distractions.
You will need to ignore the career writers
who enter wearing their accolades like military ornaments.
“Here is my BFA from a hedge fund university,”
they will say,
“And my MFA from an exclusive private college,
where we were granted a peek behind the
wizard’s thick, velvet curtain,”
the irony of their observations now
hidden behind a paywall,
the tail of the snake in its own mouth.
It is the unraveling, the bearing witness,
that sometimes sends even the strongest
of us to an early grave.
It is why I built a life that
protects the written word,
the vow to provide
access.
“Here are a few writers who were
only published posthumously,”
I tell patrons, or
“Here are words so truthful
that they were banned and
burned like witches at the stake,”
as though the disappearing ink on paper
somehow renders their observations null and void.
So if this sorcery chooses you,
do not push it away.
Though you will likely never find
fame and fortune
during your mortal years,
remember that words live forever.
It is the Irish scribes sequestered
in County Antrim, in the middle of the
craggy, wild North Atlantic,
documenting their history day and night.
It is part of an art that was carried on
despite war, slavery, divorce, rape and pillage,
suicide, mental illness, poverty, incarceration,
nuclear weapons, bigotry, genocide, and abuse.
It is finding the well worn key
to your childhood home
and testing it,
finding, to your surprise,
that the small brass indentations,
slightly warped over time,
still slide into the seasoned cylinder as you turn it,
opening the door that never quite closes again.
And your body falls,
with the understanding,
somewhere, that you will get up again,
creaky, limb by limb, like a newborn fowl,
to tell about it.
And outside the window,
somewhere in the red-orange horizon
becoming opaque with smoke,
the plantation on fire.
——
The Insurance Broker
“You must purchase life insurance for yourself,”
the pretty insurance broker tells me,
her voice perking up as she learned I was without it,
despite being single and child-free.
“Somebody has to pay to bury you.
Who is going to be that somebody?
You never want to leave the burden of
your burial to your loved ones.”
I look away to hide my smile as I think of my family.
A memory from years prior arises,
my carrying the densely packed box
of my grandmother’s ashes and
placing it on her bedside table,
trying to think of a respectful way
to lay my grandmother to
rest for the final time.
In a minute, I would bless myself
and leave our house for the last time,
accompanied by my belongings thrown
into garbage bags,
items selected for me by others
to represent over three generations
worth of memories,
I would be being hurried out by the
cruel executor whose face was
hidden by a hood,
his imaginary fortress
protected under lock and key.
A solitary witness.
I picture my father’s ashes in the large, red
urn with oriental print decorating its neck.
The humor of the large size of the urn
is not lost on me,
and I picture for a moment
how my father might fit inside,
like a shape shifter somehow crawling
back into the womb,
his knees bent and held upward,
his arms folded in a cross over his chest,
happy to hover there for eternity,
his pride protected
by the thick,
glazed walls.
Having not been invited to the service,
as his only daughter,
I wonder whose mantle now showcases
his ashes, if any.
No one will come for me.
When it is my turn,
I would like to opt out of a
formal burial altogether.
I picture in horror a lackadaisical mortician
manipulating my naked body
and trying to force it into an
elegant ensemble meant for dirt,
my arms stiff and uncooperative,
fighting against the sleeves,
the smooth buttons never fully
closing over my chest.
I spent my whole life trying to
fit into articles of clothing.
As a baby, I see my mother
sighing in frustration at my socks
and tights that never quite stretched out
properly over my long feet.
As a teenager, the shoulders of my shirts
never lay peacefully over the
thick, rounded flesh,
the gaps in the front of my
uniform Oxford shirts
always exposing me
if I dared to move,
or emote.
Instead, I picture it very simply,
my written instructions to the person
who finds me,
a copy of my notarized will on the counter,
the supplemental text providing whatever
is left unpublished or unshared
along with simple instructions:
“Take all of this,”
I will say,
“Tell the world that I saw all of her,
and this is when
I will tell you about it.”
The Galway Review 