Ferment
Red chili pepper/fish sauce/ginger/sea salt/green onion stain on denim.
Radish peeled then sliced on a mandoline like a diving board,
flames in a silver bowl. Don’t try this at home, umma said.
Too much work—easier to buy.
Garlic pounded with mortar and pestle, cases closed.
In my mother’s country, clay pots in the snow like coffins.
Unearthed from the back of my refrigerator, the smell reminds me.
Making Kimchi
I put it off for years
intimidated by history
how to contain time
make it palatable
even perfect
like our mothers
and their mothers
have before
I now gather
cloves of garlic
sea salt like snow
over the tombs
of ancestors’ jars
sprigs of green onion
curved over the span
of continents
ends sliced
napa cabbage
divided and brined
let it all sink
in gochucaru
brick red sand
of an hourglass
in my hands
thick paste mixed
like the earth
covering each bit
pack the jar
tight like a suitcase
map of cabbage
pressed against glass
peppered orange-red
labor of family tree
in the leaves
veins of rivers,
blood, country,
the heart
of what is eaten
yesterday, today
and tomorrow
turn the top
clockwise
and stay
days, weeks
for the change
the heat and
the juice rising
food of survival
how did I wait
this long for what
I alone can make
in the relish of now
hiss of air as the lid
opens like a mouth
to serve the gods
nourished in song
give us this day
what we’ve created
our daily red slice
of delicious crunch
Diana Keren Lee is the winner of a 2024 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A National Poetry Series finalist, her work has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Prelude, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and NYU.