Chapbook Poem 1

I'm writing a chapbook with my friend Monica for workshop, which means we write poems back and forth until we arrive at something of a collection or conversation. I won't be able to post the whole thing, just snippets here and there. Here's the first poem I sent to her.

A girl standing on a riverbank. This is how

it always begins for me, has to begin. Today

she doesn't know what to do with her hands.

There's so much water, so much washing to be done.

It would be easier to wear all the dirty clothes

at once and wade straight in. It would be easier

to erase everything between thirteen

and sixteen. And canoe away from all this.

The day I learned how to lie without blushing,

the other girls at the lunch table were spelling out

swear words in broken pretzels. Keep a straight face

and you can get through anything.

Wear a high collar so the red on your chest

doesn't show through. This

is what I'd tell my daughter, if I had one.

To you I can only say that there are two ways to die,

too much water or not enough, and you

don't get to pick which one. You can wash and wash

and still be drained from the neck with one slice.

You can wander through the streets at night, lonely

from loss and know a river in Egypt

is more like home than this will ever be.

Swallow these words like you would a pill.

Don't let yourself be consoled.

Seoul

Here, I often confuse the saunas with churches.

Everything looks like an office building, and I don't know

the Korean word for God or water. There's a red neon cross

above every one, but you can't see them in the daylight

unless you stare upward a long time. Sometimes I can smell

the cedar from the elevator of a building packed

with English tutors and teahouse-style rooms, kimchi soup

filtering through the rice paper walls, and I crave

the thick cotton uniform of the sauna, which is not

like the kind you wear to private school, the one

that always fails to blend you in. These oversized

yellow suits make us look like we're

from the future, where the planet has become very hot,

the air saltier. Here, we cut our hair the same length,

share ice with red beans and fruit, and wake up

jet-lag early on the heated floor,

but this doesn't make us a family. Here, strangers

sweat on one another and wash it off in the same pool.

On the subway to Yangjae, I am sardined

between the doors and a middle-aged man in tweed.

If I tilted an inch, I could rest my cheek on his shoulder.

Back to Business

I am back in Poetry Workshop, which means I am back to writing poems on a regular basis, which means I need to get my act together and post them. Soon, dear friends, soon...

In the mean time, have a Korean pizza. (Yes, it really was as delicious as it looks. Be jealous.)