4-14-2025
Bo Hee Moon
JUNNAM PROVINCE, MY BIRTHPLACE
I dream that I need to get to Korea,
but the cabs will never come, only
a rental car held together with duct tape.
I wonder if my poems can be folded
into a tiny boat large enough
to carry me across the yellow sea
and deliver me to my birthmother—
a saleswoman who graduated high school,
who found my birth unfavorable,
who met my father at a pleasure garden—
a married man.
I teach two adopted Asian girls,
one from China, one from a country I can’t pronounce.
They know they miss their birthmothers.
I am only beginning to recognize my abandonment.
I am only beginning to fold
my birth records into paper airplanes.
LEARNING KOREAN
I am sorry
for my plum-shaped tummy,
for being
the disastrous pull—seed and egg—
egg and seed,
for drawing connections
between what I know—
national flower: cow + goon + sharp breath
hello: onion-HA-say-O
grandmother: hi-money
jeon pancakes (저냐) are fat
with promise and generosity
sugar rice tea: sikhye
is mysterious mothering
my tongue is flat
with all the American curves
Levi’s jeans remind me of hamburgers
and a strip mall off the I-17,
the network of lights
turning off
and on
AN ADOPTED KOREAN GIRL’S BOOK OF SHADOWS: HOW TO CLEAR A CREATIVE BLOCKAGE
I saw a sprightly baby mule deer by the side of 89A
and then a dead deer. Venus has stationed direct.
My night as my background music, my neighbors’ noise
has ceased. For once, my problems aren’t really problems.
I don’t get out of the bath to answer the door.
Like I could know where this life is going,
a Dairy Queen dipped cone cracks in my mouth.
Making sense of loss, the conscious mind looks for signs.
I’m in an airport terminal, not at a bar asking for water.
-from Omma: Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs (Tinderbox Editions), celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Bo Hee Moon is a South Korean adoptee. Born in South Korea, she was adopted at three-months-old. Her poems have appeared in Cha, CutBank, diode, Radar, Redivider, The Offing, Zone 3, and others. Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, published by Tinderbox Editions, is her debut collection of poems. She previously published under a different name.
