Replacing Penelope
Each stray grain picked up from the ground
means new life.
Each day I shift from maiden to crone.
If the quest were getting through the forest without
touching anybody I would surely win.
It’s about time when all the small notebooks we hoarded
morph into more than records, more than shame.
If we wore the rouge without irony and if we wore
the slip dress without any sense of disdain,
I think we would come closer to that emotion
that releases its scent just before dusk
as we stand alone in the kitchen.
At the flowering heart of empire, as I clean my
bathroom and open the window to summer wind,
fold my laundry, stop my ears
at any indication of death,
I fantasize about ways to make all this more delicious.
On a balcony somewhere, you would
sit in the sun and I would wash the fruit.
We aren’t children anymore.
We can’t shrug off how we survived those years.
So it is a loss. It is a wound, as glistening as cherry skin
beneath the flowing tap. And what else?
What else – the wail is coming from inside
and outside, but we must enjoy this buttered bread.
The fight I never signed up for.
The fight I will always sign up for. And I’m here anyways.
Anyways and always. I churn with the past
that shows up on my skin. I toss a pit into the bowl.
I emerge from the room with an armful of
gardenia, silk, bread and rice for those I love.
And cravings, desire to give myself what
no nation or lover could give me . . .
the only things I pray to with my muscular arms
in the solitary blue evenings.
Let me weave it on my wild loom
kept secret in the small forum of my bedroom,
the moment I would know exactly
the way I want to be changed.
I walk to the Korean grocery store to buy apples
Everyone is greedy for apples, plastic bags rustling.
I sense an elderly woman’s eyes on me.
I interpret her eyes as venom, potent disappointment,
the kind I had felt from my mother and my grandmother.
A look that declares you unmoored, unfaithful to something
you should have protected with your entire being.
She approaches me and smiles.
I’ll show you how to pick the good ones. See the top?
The tears there? That’s how you know the inside is honey.
Back at the apartment, I am startled by each bite,
a well of fragrance beneath the wound.
Alone and slumped at the table, I imagine
the elderly woman’s wounds and mine.
I am a branch of a woman, and I am moved by fruit,
the kindness of a stranger.
I think of my own refusal to mend,
the possibility of finding another story,
another emotion beneath the site of injury.
Conjuring the Water Rabbit
“You do not have to be good.” – Mary Oliver
The yeasty heat of something frying,
sesame oil holding rice grains together,
ribbons of egg to go in the soup bowl.
The door to the balcony gets open,
then gets closed again.
I complement a friend of the hostess
for her dashing red dress, matching with
red eyeshadow and red nails.
Recovering from years in which
all perception was a closed room
in a dense forest, I sit bewildered
among raucous figures far from home.
Everybody tries to help me,
I find myself trying to open lids,
touching an arm despite myself.
I do not need to be good, or even coherent.
My task is to open the small Styrofoam containers
of rice, to make sure the woman next to me
can reach what her appetite longs for.
Yearning, and perhaps nostalgia.
A hint of sadness. I remember
the brown cheongsam she had made
from scratch, what felt like one hundred
dumplings waiting for us on the table.
I know fortune isn’t the same as survival.
On the balcony, as we debate astrology,
I imagine the water rabbit unfurling
from its hiding place, blue green
in an eternal formless spirit.
It pauses just above our shoulders,
then disappears.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Hayun Cho
