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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.

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