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.