Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
America’s Modern Korean Bride
Gait is a tell-tale of origin, so to blend in with Manhattan scrapes: walk
straight like Ma’s back-brace, translate pastrami energy into
hare-velocity, clutch Chloé ’s straps straight like
Vanderbilt’s railroads over dear Hudson - so maybe you’ll earn a fortune
too. You’ve always babbled of second puberty as a woman - here’s your
chance, kid. There’s plenty of insecurity ribboned in your gut, like nasty
November nausea from nitrogen spiked burgers: no worries, ’cuz there ain’t
nothing this city can’t fix with a chunk of aspirin. Feel, feed off the city, drink over
and under the city’s spritz and din: if you open your Asian slit-eyes wide
enough, intoxicate your eyes bleary with ol’ Hollywood glamor, you’ll be damn
pretty like those models in Vogue. Atta girl, that’s the spirit.
Women like you, their dream opened in September of 1945,
donned American veils like snow, brided themselves to ‘merican soldiers
swallowed Orientalism like G.I. whiskey, picked at rice between their teeth,
left 38th parallel green with envy, gnawed on green cards like sweet nicotine
‘cuz hope was or is, Benny and Abe on post-war currency. Get drunk over
the streets like a war - bachelorette, climb up Walk street ‘till
your sole-skin bruise like sick-green dollars beneath your feet, cuz
you’re just a sweetheart in good ol’ America and you left East
for dreams of the West.
Ji Hyo Kim is a student writer hailing from Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and is forthcoming in the Eunoia Review and Beyond Words Magazine. She published her first poem orally in ninth grade through a podcast hosted by award-winning poet Mark Grist.