Dress Up

The men in my family tell me
American girls love American boys
in the dark.

I asked my grandfather how to dress.
He wasn’t sure what “American boys” wore
so he dressed me like my brother.

Who wore only polo shirts
and wanted to go to Yale.
He left for New Haven
as I crawled through the spice cabinet.

I can almost smell the ginger root
simmering in the wok. I want to get fat
on white rice and Kalbi,

to hoard each short rib
in the back of my cheek.

As I wait for her, I fill my stomach
with leftover French fries.
I salt each one just to know that it’s there.

When she arrives
I’ll ask to keep my shirt on.
What she thinks is more important
than what she sees.

I can picture my childhood bedroom.
The blue and red yin yang flag
hanging from the ceiling. I saw it
every day, so I learned to ignore it.

A Cage in America: Bastard Brothers

Korean Standard Time is thirteen hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone.

Let’s only eat radish tops and forget our bloodlines.
Now we can set down our sketchbooks and throw out
all the half-drawn pictures of men we hoped
were our fathers. We can finally focus on ourselves.
Rumi says, the body is what the body does
and we’ve been charging in all the wrong directions:
frying everything in butter, crushing green pills
to sleep and gladly blaming it all on the men
we could never meet. But Listen, in our new
homeland there are no boys who look like us
and speak “American” and back in Seoul
it’s already tomorrow. Look at me.         Here,
take this sandpaper. Scrub away whatever
you don’t like.                We were never anyone’s to forget.

Image: ArtistsCry13 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.