![](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Profile_2023_Dabin-Jeong-225x300.jpg)
Grandmother’s Haiku over the Phone
What time is it there
It is like the world is flipped
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It’s like an opposite world
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It’s like the world’s upside down
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It is like another world
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
Are you going to sleep now
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
Is there even rice to eat
It’s warm like spring here
Granddaughter’s Haibun
![Is it safe to go outside a day after being snowed in? I wouldn’t know and neither do my eyes as they lift the feathers of the blind to peek at the white concrete. I just received the news that my grandfather fell down, broke his hip, and is still alive. I know the face of survival, the one with removable dentures. My grandmother has been en pointe at the edge of death since I was born. Consoling her over her contact-deficient husband on a hospital bed: a certain obligation. We open the conversation with six deep furrows over her half-eyebrows, making her face all walnut. (I have already written about her macerated eyelids and brain smooth like a lotus seed.) I am covered under the green patches and she asks if it is bedtime already. The worldly mystery she has yet to comprehend is the time zone. Yogurt has been my main sustenance which I substitute with soybean paste soup for her face. She would rather be sad and alone. I yell to her face: don’t be sad and alone. Five minutes. She asks what time it is where I am. We fall into a pattern like an old couple, a choreography I follow six times every time. She is distracted by all her daughters caring about her. Wants to leave my puffed-up face that is neither here nor there. Without buttons to feel, she can’t leave. My mother interjects and chuckles: She doesn’t remember. In the background, a fade of my grandmother’s ticking dentures.](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-24-at-6.27.26 PM-1024x652.png)
![What time is it there
It is like the world is flipped
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It’s like an opposite world
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It’s like the world’s upside down
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
It is like another world
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
Are you going to sleep now
Have you eaten yet
What time is it there
Is there even rice to eat
It’s warm like spring here](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-24-at-6.27.46 PM-496x1024.png)
***
Author photograph courtesy of Dabin Jeong