


01-28-2024
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
RESTITUTION FOR THE GRANDSON
If, in the hour of the ox, you had passed
from your own bright life into ours,
or perhaps if your mother had begged
more fervently for you during the spring tide,
when the sea cannot help but give
and give for its fullness,
even if you had not been born
in the ruinous hour of the boar,
as the shore emptied its cupped hands
back into the breakers of neap tide,
if your father had not shut himself up
with the bark and bone of small forests,
had instead cultivated patriarchies
tenderly and fiercely, if and if and yet––
here I stand, lifting my empty net,
slinging into the sea from this precipice
your sister’s scrolls, your mother’s oath,
the spent cockleshells of clams,
insufficient recompense for what
the sea asks us to return.
THE PEARL DIVERS’ DAUGHTERS
We are the pearl divers’ daughters
skinning the ocean of her abalone scales,
planting oyster seeds in each other’s vertebrae.
Our mothers carved veins into the sea
with reinvented air, wrists scarred in rows and rings––
octopi and coral––legs scissoring against the sun,
the space between their thighs profound as trenches.
Haenyeo, we name them, pearl divers whose songs build
and blossom like barrel-fires or anemones.
They press our shoulders against the ribs
of whale sharks, our palms on dotted black rays.
We graze our fingers through damselfish schools,
but our appetites are as insatiate as the sea is for land.
We gnaw the shore, legs wound in seaweed,
skin flayed by the tongues of clams, pulling, pushing.
Arirang, our mothers say patriotically, and cities
bloom from our spines, rooting us to cartographies,
thumbing our eyes into sand-locked jewels.
We are the pearl divers’ daughters,
our sisters’ skirts are hemmed in coral,
our brothers are cloud-eyed eels.
Arirang, we say, our futures pearled
into every empty shell, our tongues pressed
against the words until we become them.
SONGS OF THIRST: SIX SIJO
Here, the deer, having no tusks, grow great bone branches from their skulls.
Here, they cannot wound the water, and their thirst is so small,
even in the rutting season. Not like ours. Not like mine.
*
Once, when I was eleven, I saw the fish-oil hand cream
scented with crushed jasmine petals, how Grandmother’s fingers daubed
then smoothed over the hard backs of her hands. Only once I saw this.
*
Grandmother’s fingers binding a dragonfly body with silk,
unspooling the thread, knotting it around my thumb for a kite.
Her hand hard against my face for letting it slip so soon.
*
There are many kinds of thirst: that of the sea for the shore,
potted roots for the forest floor, woman for a man she cannot have—
father, lover, son—that which thickens and blackens the tongue.
*
How many times we counted the stars in our constellations—
the rooster, the tiger, the boar, and mine, which should have been the horse.
All this to keep from counting the sons who drowned when no one was near.
*
I have swallowed the bitter branch of my brother’s absence.
No water now is sweet enough to slake this ghostly thirst.
And this is not a love song, nor a glossary of despair.
-from Hour of the Ox, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Translation Grand Prize from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the NEA, Knight Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, and more. She is co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival and serves as a program manager for Miami Book Fair. www.MarciCalabretta.com. All social media handles: @marcicalabretta