DREAMING A GOO DAUGHTER DREAMING A HORROR MOTHER DREAMING A BUFFALO HORIZON DREAMING A PASTORAL: SUBURBAN RICE PADDY DREAMING AN APARTMENT THAT DOESN’T STOP DREAMING A BREATHING THAT LOCKS THE DOOR DREAMING A MOTHER POUNDING THE DOOR DREAMING A SET OF EARS THAT UNDOES THE POUNDING DREAMING A PIECEMEAL DAUGHTER WHO FORGOT HER LUNCH DREAMING A LUNCH THAT STINKS AND IS THROWN AWAY BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS DREAMING AN AFTERNOON THAT FORGOT WORDS LIKE “CRAZY” AND “LAZY” DREAMING A MOTHER WHO LEVITATES ON HER SICKBED DREAMING THE HOUSE IN WHICH SHE LEVITATES DREAMING THE LIGHTS TURNED OFF EXCEPT IN THE FAR HIGH ROOM IN WHICH SHE LEVITATES DREAMING HER FACE SMEARED WITH GOCHUJANG LIKE FERMENTED BLOOD DREAMING HER EYES ARE COVERED IN THIS GOO AND CANNOT OPEN DREAMING HER EARS ARE COVERED IN THIS GOO AND THIS ALLOWS HER TO HEAR THE BODY DREAMING HER MOUTH IS ALWAYS A SMEAR DREAMING THIS PASTE IS STUCK TO HER SKIN LIKE ANOTHER SKIN DREAMING THIS PASTE ALLOWS HER TO LEVITATE DREAMING SHE MOVES FROM THE BED TO THE GARDEN STILL LEVITATING DREAMING SHE BURIED THE PASTE OF HER FACE IN THE GARDEN TO END THE LEVITATIONS DREAMING THAT THE LEVITATIONs CONTINUE DREAMING A LIVING THAT VACUUMS AT NIGHT DREAMING LIGHTS ON AT 3AM AND GETTING CAUGHT WITH A LEATHER PURSE WRAPPED AROUND A PILLOW AND BETWEEN THE LEGS AND WORDLESSLY SHE PULLS IT AWAY AND TURNS THE LIGHTS OUT AND SHUTS THE DOOR DREAMING SHE CHECKS AGAIN AT 4AM DREAMING SHE CHECKS AGAIN AT 5AM DREAMING PERVERSION THAT RUNS THIS FIELD UNDER THE TOO LONG GRASSES DREAMING AN URGENCY THAT WAKES THE DAUGHTER AT THOSE HOURS THOUGH THE MOTHER STOPS COMING DREAMING THE INSURGENT BUFFALO ARRIVE ONLY TO STAY STILL DREAMING THEY LEVITATE NOT UNLIKE A MOTHER DREAMING THE HAIR RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE CLOGGING DREAMING A DAUGHTER AS A VOICEBOX FOR THE PATRIARCHY DREAMING A DAUGHTER AS A WHIP WHO MUST BE WHIPPED DREAMING A DAUGHTER THAT KNOWS HOW TO VACUUM BEFORE MIDNIGHT DREAMING A DAUGHTER GOO DREAMING A MOTHER HORROR DREAMING A MOTHER OR A DAUGHTER DREAMING THE ITCH UNRELATED TO BATHING DREAMING A SKIN UNRELATED TO KIN                         My mother is a body horror. She sits in a chair, not facing me. She snatches objects from my hands. Her parts don’t coalesce. Meaning spreads around. Where her mouth was, more questions. She is my container. She carried me up a mountain. I am her container. At the top of the mountain, she drank from a spring. She drank this water to store it in me, the fetus balloon, like an empty gourd. We keep spilling on each other.                           it feels like i have always been in this bed, with a call from my mom saying eat beef, put on anti wrinkle creams, read it when you have time & i reply i have a reading tonite and she think i am talking about reading a book she annotated by hand with simpler synonyms or definitions so i could read the korean & and don't bother to correct her, just reply that vacation is over too soon & she tells me what my shampoo regimen could be with and without the hot water running out so quickly and i ask her about the soap i gave to her and she says your father used it up and that when he gets warts they pass onto her so she must keep him clean and he must now use very strong soaps & how its summer there she must wear short sleeves. we are living in different planets with a foamy exchange between us, these substitute forms of care that pass between us                             Dream: Sitting with our mother, sitting on the floor of a small cramped space, it is windowless. Bleak light from the kitchen. I have warned my brother about her, but he has ideas about nurturing mothers embedded in his head. Her body is narrow, bent. We reminisce about some happier time, once we walked through an alley glittering with clothes, bright pants on floating mannequins. Briefly she's incandescent, then flickers off. We have to go then, I am packing food for my brother-- a giant dish of chicken wings, squid. Our mother begins to eat all the chicken wings, pale and soy sauced, the bones crunching in her mouth. In my mind i'm rearranging the dish so the gaps left by her eating are filled. We keep thinking she will stop. Brother looks on horrified, especially when she begins on the squid, and they seem to slip off the plate with no chewing at all.                         Dream: polyamorous detention facility where you had to make it work or else you lose your housing but the world outside was even more fucked, and it was also under complete surveillance and watched by everyone else in the facility, and the "elders" there in particular gave us advice and progress reports. I was leaving soon because I got into school & maybe just transferring to another facility but my mother was visiting and telling me she needed to learn english so she could be understood at work and in the world outside of my dad. So I said yes, whatever that meant, I was going to find a way. It was fucked but everyone was acting really pleasant.                           Yesterday in the shower I thought of how often I think of my mother and grandmother's phrases about my appearance, in particular about my hair, that it's unkempt, a young lady brushes her hair (to which I reply as a mantra in my head every time: I am not a young lady -never was - never shall be, even if I brush my hair), and most memorably: your hair is tteok! (Tteok= ricecake though it can be a more general term than that, the way bap aka rice can just mean a meal, and bbang, bread is sometimes just shorthand for western food) & I always imagine my hair as a mass of ricecake, one of those tteok towers, latticed warm towers of sweet sticky cakes or soft steamed ones brushed with sweet rice alcohol, boozy and delicious, or caked in a thick dusty layer of grain and bean powders, creamy like what frosting wants to be but can't quite be as totalizing of an experience because the fat and sugar coat your mouth first. Yes, my hair is tteok, my body in all kinds of ways not what it should be, my clothes, strewn, ill fitting, unfolded. Broken down femme. Something is to short, to tall, too transparent, too asymmetrical, too flamboyant; something is awry. Something is gooey, which means it clings to the surfaces of things and takes away their dirty imprints. Hard deserts of filth, the crackling of aridity, above a molten sort of dirt, that moves, keeps moving. Somewhere under the goo hides a daughter. Somewhere under the daughter, more goo.                   In my dream I was in a hotel and too tan/brown for these celebrities to hang out with me. And I kept trying to do my hair and makeup but it wasn't working. And then I resigned myself to books. there were beautiful pictures of my mother on the wall but looking closer they were mirrors she kept moving and frowning in them. Laura was using this microwave alternative that ran on vodka and sugar. There was a popular food stand that sold overpriced korean snacks and that made me sad. Finally I was in my mother’s garden and in it was a giant thick snake and I used the snake to illustrate a point, wrapping its thinner parts around things like an electric cord and I was saying something like look how independently the body can be stretched and exist in different places but still be a part of one body. Then I had to undo the snake and I also had a giant raw bun in my mouth that was rising and expanding and people would come over and try to talk to me and that meant taking the bun out of my mouth and putting down the giant snake and I was like where were you when I was too tan/unpretty and resigned myself to books? I kept pinching the snake’s black and shiny head and thinking I'm sorry I'm sorry I used to you just to make a point.                       We went to a Chinese buffet in provincial Bochum, Germany, a country road, taking a country bus. we were being our loud gyeongsangdo-Korean selves, having a conversation about the psy Gangnam style phenomenon (my mom kept reminding me: "you were born in a hospital in Gangnam!" and "Berklee doesn't seem *that* hard to get into" etc) and then another Asian man gets on the bus and this is too much for the old German couple in the front, the man stares directly to the back of the bus, turns to his wife and they don't stop shaking their heads for the rest of the ride. At the Chinese buffet we are the only Asian people besides the ones working there, it is decent especially considering the location, I eat duck and liver and bamboo shoots and tapioca pudding and lots of watermelon and I realize I have forgotten how to eat buffet style, the sheer amount of food makes me dizzy. We take a walk in the park full of geese and their shit, Germans leave as we approach and do not accept their vow of silent reverie looking out into the blue tubing of the waterpark in the horizon. The dinky tour boat with a giant Deutsch flag and tiny Italian flags. The father and his kids feeding the swans.     – OKI SOGUMI Oki Sogumi was born in Seoul, lives in Philadelphia (recently transplanted from Oakland), and writes poetry, speculative fiction, and into little boxes on the internet. She dreams commune dreams.