Recycled Consciousness 

Joanne Hwang, United States

My mother knew me in 1977—thirty-one years before I 

drew my first breath. 

A maternal dove leaned 

between her breasts and scratched roman numbers onto 

her skin. The big hand, as it swept, eclipsed with the 

infant hand at 11. Its lines 

reminded her of dried moss 

that slouches over my headstone in Jeju’s forests. 

 My mother knew me in 2004—four years before she knew 

I would be named 

After morning’s calm; an 

expectation bundled into the dawning hours I would fail to reap. 

The peaking waves at Rockaway were tumultuous when she witnessed 

my adrenaline-ridden eyes 

in the heart of a military 

man while ashes floored the Atlantic between them and home. 

My mother knew me in 2008—months before her father 

became an evergreen. 

She reached my nimble 

fingers into an empty urn; to teach me absence while internalizing 

presence from the crevices of her body. She held me over his coffin;

so a carcass could model 

my reflection—

and recycle his consciousness into my malleable skull. 

My mother knew me in 2021—years before I would ever 

dare to know myself. 

She held my limbs up 

to sterile fluorescence so that her veins would not puncture 

from the torrent of superficial waterfalls—so her feet would not 

trip over the ridges that 

line my shoulders—so 

her heart would not stone from the welding of her tears—so, 

my mother knew in me—in every moment of the carousel 

of her existence. She 

knew me when she 

heard the towers collapse on her radio. She knew the ways 

her veins and arteries would intertwine bones, and to bind 

her to me before 

she dug into the soil. 

Joanne Hwang is a 16 year old writer from Brooklyn, New York. She attends Stuyvesant High School where she writes and edits for the Opinions Department of her school newspaper The Spectator. She primarily writes poetry and personal narratives as a consequence of being an emotional-driven person. Other than chasing adrenaline in the theater, she is inexplicably fascinated by education injustices, run-on sentences, and her writing reflects the temperamental nature of everything around her.