PORK BELLY
Appa compares his beer belly to his favorite food, Korean three-layered pork belly—
samgyeopsal.
I laugh and respond, “Me too!”
My family has turned a Black+Decker griddle from Sears into a reclaimed bbq grill for us Ohio
Koreans without an Asian market nearby.
Silent, umma turns the pork belly over on the pan.
“If you’re not careful, it’ll turn into ogyeopsal!” appa jests,
pointing to my belly—
from three- to -five-layers, growing “a “Japan doll” head with an extravagant mound of a body
A belly distended from corn-fed “fire and fury”1
a gut-turned-missile
belying blood
lines drawn
over effaced bodies and no spoils for
the Korean war is ongoing,
“The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is
flesh” my sisters fill with laughter. 2
I notice umma’s finger, slivered from the mandolin.
1 Donald Trump’s public remarks on North Korea on August 8, 2017: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
2 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee. (New York: Tanam Press, 1982; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Citations refer to the UC Press edition.
. . .
ASIAN FISHING
for compliments so my face is no longer
fiction
theirs haunt the blue light
thirsty for the new for the
future is Asian.
You will arrive at the future tomorrow at 9 am.
When you arrive, the future will have already departed.
Future imperfect tense
not worthy of addressing in person
their faces warped into an anime character whose name they can’t pronounce,
wearing some infantile schoolgirl outfit that reeks of child pornography another word for
Asian fetish.
I wonder what it feels like to make eye contact with someone and remain tethered to my body
my insides not spilling out for
Koreans say it’s better to get beaten by the whip first but
what happens next?
My yellow an accessory to their white
emptiness they fill with us as if we are collectibles
want one of each but never more than one lest we
rebel and destroy the foundations of a world built on white
“guilt is just another name for impotence.”1
1 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981): 7-10.
. . .
SUSURRUS
Covert whispers suspend in the gristly fog.
How much is it costing to breathe their air?
I’m reminded of a Korean saying: “It’s dark under the lamp”—
hostages to light that spills over into the pitch-dark of yesterday’s forgettings.
My Korean is not my mother’s but
a counterfeit passed down through hushed conversations with my parents who refused to let me
expand like the corn fields at the county border.
My imagination splintered between the TV commercials of white children and looking out my
living room window at these people who taunted me with their profligate laughter.
The 1990s was a generation of wanting to have one of each color so that my tokenism became an
emblem of their mercy but
all I got in return was
pity
the giant in my throat crawling and scratching at my
trachea leaving marks that my mother calls
duty or sacrifice
her voice a cataclysm in public
ringing with the sounds of the U.S. dropping “more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than
during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II.”1
Bomb, napalm, a choice like our Koreas
splintered into piecemeal rations for hungry expats who ask for seconds and compliment my
English as if it is something so worthy of history
this phantom tongue I devour with curious rage.
1 Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World: New York, 2020), 195.
. . .
GOHYANG (HOMETOWN)
Appa says, “I want to retire but when I don’t work, I get angry.”
He works himself sick because of the unceded years of
untranslated emotion.
His sigh stenciled into habit so that remembrance is
a rock propping the door open to
Gunpo where he used to eat
cross-legged on the fire-heated floor, the courtyard behind him,
the kimchi jars blazing in the January sun of lunar tidings
from ancestors he prays to
kneeling on top of more kimchi fermenting
underground devout to
the covenant of another season.
About the author: Joey S. Kim (she/her) is a scholar, poet, and Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. Her first book of poems, Body Facts, was published by Diode Editions in 2021. Her work has been published in Pleiades: Literature in Context, the LA Review of Books, Shondaland, and elsewhere. Her creative and scholarly interests converge at the intersection of Anglophone literature and Asian American women’s experiences. A literary critic as well as a poet, her monograph, Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation (2023), traces the invention of the “Oriental” subject during the Romantic period. joeyskim.com
About the illustrator: Gaby FeBland (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working in puppetry, illustration, playwriting, and performance. She is a proud co-founder of Foreshadow, an experimental shadow puppetry company. Her original plays and puppetry have been performed off-Broadway and at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Dixon Place, Green-Wood Cemetery, Coney Island U.S.A., Jalopy Theatre, the Owl Music Parlor, and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. As an actor, she is represented by Big Mouth Talent. For five years, she was the accordionist for Friends of the Bog. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Gaby attended Northwestern University, where she majored in Theatre Arts and Spanish. She holds a Graphic Design Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her illustration and design work is featured on trains, newspapers, magazines, websites, event posters, albums, band shirts, greeting cards, buttons, and wedding venues across the world.
