Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
(USA)
A Small Guest
Alan Kurdî (2013-2015)
Seaweed followed the law
It released you to waves bussing
your small body
down, down dark currents
silver minnow tunnel. Your red
shirt swallowed
the Aegean, billowed
and swelled, but your shoes stayed on
By them the sea
knew your refuge dream
restored you to shore so your father
Abdullah could find
you, a guest of the sea
Without guests all houses would be a grave
the poet wrote
making a worm from mist
a bird from sand. What prayer
transforms this empty
castle guards watch
ignorant of the gift to shelter each other?
Who will help
close, open, close
your velcro laces for the journey
your father dares
for your sake? You a gift
loved with milk cake and honey. You
practice the names
to keep you safe—
not Mohammed, Jesus. Not Muslim
Christian. Hush—
don’t bother now
as tourists gather and multiply your image
on their tiny screens
You are not their orphan
of beach foam, Alan flag bearer, watching
from the lap of God
Fox
After torching
my ancestral fields for planting,
I drank makgeolli
while the cinders cracked
and tailed. She crept
along the smoky ridge,
her pelt musk amber.
She was always near
in the char licking her paw
shifting as I watched
her pink tongue fasten shapes
the moonlight cast
on my gray sleeve.
On guard I covered my heart
with my flask. She bared
her blackened teeth.
Birdsong for Ten Thousand Years
Koguryeo Tomb Murals, Northern Korea
The dying queen assembled birds that could talk like men—
parrots, roosters, cranes, mynahs aiding the lost
merchants, magpies carrying muddy twigs to a fissured
immortal terrace, kestrels, the white falcon
fearless of invading dogs. To guard against four directions
she consulted the phoenix, tiger, dragon, tortoise-snake.
Each tethered a cosmic map soaked with a blood tree
where the three-legged crow lodged his command.
Bride to this sunbird, the queen presided, her eye a moon
mirror for the constellations. Which bird did she prefer
for a song to establish her kingdom for ten thousand years,
her final wish a pearl embroidered dragon dress
in which to receive the fairies in the endless blue?
This—
Master Sergeant Buckstead, Korea 195? | Northfield 2009
I too want to forget the image
properly buried in the Gangwon forest
reclaimed by grass
I tire of all this seeing
that’s not seeing a head turning
on a rifle’s mouth
turning puss-swollen
eyes chapped by wind
rustling mountain trees
the soldier’s red hair
As he raises his rifle toward the trees
the head spins
in four directions
shock the birds hear. The birds
scatter
and arch their dark backs
A cry snaps through their necks
as they lift up
as one to the sky
faraway from the forest while
the soldier stares
into the sun’s black eye
he can still describe as an old professor
He smiles
at that distance
His hands again cradle the rifle’s head
in the photograph
he’ll pass around
the lecture hall for his students to see
what he remembers of
mud, the enemy, thirst, this—
no one can identify or bring home
to bury
This is his image
the birds can’t read and can’t forget
a ricochet
wind from the sun
a wind driving them from that tree
flared
in the sun’s center
like an unshuttered lens. Time captures
his hands
his regalia pose
exposed to a light that rends apart
like this—
Reading Keith Wilson’s “The Girl”
Yes, I’ve thought about tone
how white space stages
Korea 1953.
A girl silk-gowned,
small breasts, thin
indirect face.
Whether
Wilson carved away
the naval officers’
crisp white kits
in an Inchon officers club
himself a young sailor
curious, a boy
slung to the right.
Pinched and swollen
the hand-rolled joints dangled
between the men’s thighs
as they fingered and flicked
hot off each other
and at last, in the dark,
Wilson
the lips parted
swallowed the cherry.
& how easily [he] came
marks of rank about him
so delicious
that later
in passion
in light not understood
he scratched out
the foreign words
coaxed from the men’s creased hems,
and for the crinkle of paper
passing hands, he wrote “The Girl.”
It had to be a girl.
Yi Sang’s Room
Kim Haegyeong | Seochon, Seoul 1910-33
At this table
I pose as an illiterate draftsman
Tax collectors
commissioned me for an imperial museum
but I design my name
as a false frame
though marked by bureaucrats
as an industrious example
There on rafters of bone
I inscribe an orange
butterfly for the virtuous
wives sickened
by their husbands’ semen
pumped to Battleship Island
to motor coal cars
The messages the men carve
I want to go home
Beloved I miss you
into the timbered shafts
shingle my roof against a red sun
and within its blaze I cut
lengths of air
for walls that a solitary prisoner
released from Seodaemun
can dream inside
Here I no longer fear
the tenure committee
who prefers red lacquered bowls
to story loss
or administrators
who nail ordinances to my porch
Motherless my words
may be dismissed as experiments
or disappear
under a courtyard lake
or divide a pillared darkness
into floating rooms
in which monks and poets eat
The bronze latch slips
and leaves blow through the gate
Now it’s possible
to speak in earnest of escape
Don’t let disaster catch you
immobile and bereft
Failure is also a posture against, against
They’re from Jennifer’s new collection Interrogation Room, which is a finalist for a national prize and forthcoming from White Pine in 2018.
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Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion, recipient of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015); Song of a Mirror, finalist for the Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Award; and Interrogation Room: Poems (forthcoming). Her work has appeared recently in Blackbird, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, and Poetry International. She has received grants from the Daesan Foundation, Intermedia Arts, and Minnesota State Arts Board. Currently, Jennifer is associate professor of English and program director of Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Photo credit: Kyle Obermann