Esther Kim

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          In the kitchen, Umma listens
to the mother who smirks,

then says her daughter studies
          twelve hours a day. Umma nods,

lips pursed as she slices
          a speckled radish. Years ago,

          my harabeoji* followed
night, wandering untethered

                    through the dregs of the city. He was

thirteen, an inkling of a star.
          Cicadas buzzed

                              as the shadow of a farm
                    glazed over his eyes.

A crimson train fled the countryside.
          His pocket was picked, unprayed.

                              He reached the fluorescent open of a hotel,
          a counterfeit heaven

                              like the lamp-lit room
of a studying daughter. She wanders

through textbooks, wondering
                    where school leads. To an open refuge,

          she thinks, studying, in mothered
yet motherless light.

 

 

*My harabeoji (grandfather) left his family’s farm to go to school in the city.

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White Hunger

          1919

with this spirit and this mind, give all loyalty—

          two boys steal their betrayed anthem back
with their mouths. a day ago:

the softened skins of persimmons, the flood

          of khaki uniforms pillaging Seoul, a sea away
from home. they pull

ripe laughter right out of their neighbors,

          then swallow them whole.
now, the boys offer their tune

to their gods, gods who transpose

          forsythias and rice cakes
into resistance, into gold

prayers for independence. in the black hours

          of february, as the boys bury
their prayers, they take root.

then, another flood of khaki

          claims the littered town,
the littered homes filled with littered books

the boys once read together—

          young faces streaked red and gold,
overripe persimmons. have the gods

across the East Sea ever cut

          a persimmon seed open? inside,
a millennium of white hunger, a monsoon.

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Esther Kim is a Korean-American writer from Potomac, Maryland. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in SOFTBLOW, Crashtest Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among others. In the summer of 2019, she participated in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. A high school junior, she has been recognized by the Library of Congress, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards as a National Gold Medalist, the Atlantic, and the Poetry Society of the UK.