Poem of the Week | May 11, 2026

Radian Hong is a poet from Northern California. His work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, swamp pink, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He is the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Scholar in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also studies philosophy and Spanish. 

“demilitarized poem” by Radian Hong is our Poem of the Week.

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demilitarized poem

geumgang bluebells scab over 
a skinned hillside  
 
sutured with razor wire. 
a red-crowned crane perches 
on a landmine, light 
as a peck on the lips.  
 
takes flight 
silently as abandoning. 
 
or rapture. two siberian tigers 
the last on the peninsula 
imprint the grass with their backs, 
muscles denting mud. 
not fearing land mines 
or japanese ammunition. 
 
a ruined taebong castle burrows  
out of a gothic novel.  
unexcavated rooms 
 
swaddling siberian tiger cubs 
& other ghosts. here,  
peace is an absence 
 
of everything else that matters. 
like an endangered bluebell  
licking a landmine 
 
or you & i stargazing through bullet holes. 

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Author’s Note

“demilitarized zone” is from a series of negatives—poems whose subjects are present only in the shape of their absence. It is a war poem. It is also a peace poem. Natural beauty filling the cavity left by war becomes a kind of grief, like the sweetness of a toothache. It is the empty promise of romanticism, of armistice. The Korean war is still not over legally. It is still not over spiritually or geographically or bodily.