by Joan Kwon Glass

‍ ‍After "Spring Letter from the South" by Keetje Kuipers‍ ‍


Mother, you should see this place.
It’s as if when God created the Earth,
he knew we would destroy it, so, last minute,
he penciled in paradise on the edge
to remind us what we’d taken for granted.

We never talk about them anymore,
my sister and her son—your daughter and your grandson.
I guess there is just so much we can say
after nine years have passed. There’s no one
new to blame. No new memories.
Only old questions.

I look up and the rustling palm trees remind me
how much distance there is between us.
Between you and I, mother, between what is lost
and what is surrendered.
Between their last hours on Earth and this hour.
Between us and everything unknown to us.

I am wearing a sun hat speckled with strawberries
because I want to be ready for joy.
But will I recognize it when it comes?
Would you recognize me without this sorrow?

You would not approve of this place, mother,
with its pride flags everywhere, its dewy, tan women
in spandex rollerblading down the boardwalk,
shirtless men on bikes, blasting music with foul language.

I haven’t seen a single church on Miami Beach.
No Costco either, for that matter. I don’t know
what you would do here, mother,
in a town with no church and no Costco.
Since they died, you’ve gotten worse, going to one or both
every day instead of a few times a week. Now, you need
to know where I am every minute.
I come up the driveway and before I put the car in park,
you are standing in front of me, waiting.

There’s a movie that takes place here in Miami—
The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.
At the end, there’s a scene where everyone dresses in drag
and hides in a gay nightclub to avoid being recognized.
I imagine you and I there together, in stilettos and wigs
dancing to ABBA or Sister Sledge. When I think of joy,
I think of you and I pretending to be other people.

When I was growing up you always told me
that your mother sent you money from Korea
because you were her favorite. What I have come
to understand is that your mother, my grandmother,
understood how limited you are. She understood
that if she did not take care of you, that we—
you, my sister & I—may not survive.

Mother, it is spring in Miami.
The flowers are abundant and their perfume
is dizzying and lascivious. People are coming up
from the beach with wet hair and sunburns and
jazz is playing nearby. I am sitting on a bench
off Ocean Drive in my strawberry hat and later
I’ll buy overpriced gelato as the sun sets in this world
and I’ll wonder if there is a sun wherever they are now.
I’m drawing us all from memory—how we looked
the year they died. I’m drawing us in drag on the dance floor,
mom. I’m leaving room for paradise.
____________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry as well as finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her book, Night Swim, won the Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured on/in NPR, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Poetry, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She has received residencies from SWWIM, Vermont Studio Center, and Prospect Street Writers House.

by Joan Kwon Glass

The billboard just before exit 21 displays a photo
of Rhonda, a middle-aged woman before weight loss surgery.
It promises that in one mile, we will meet a lighter version of her.
A church billboard asks if we have suffered enough.
I’ve started listening to audiobooks to distract myself
from the slow, painful, inching homeward. Today a narrator
explains the tendency of ancient peoples to form cultures
around rejection. Refusing the fishing canoe or superior
farming tool of a neighboring tribe–lineage determined
more by what is renounced than what is shared.
I am writing this poem about traffic instead of the love
poem my partner longs for, and I try not to wonder
what this says about me as a person. The truck behind me
edges closer, and I resist the urge to slam on my brakes.
At least once a week in my town, in spite of signs
warning them against driving beneath it, a four-wheeler
gets stuck under the overpass and has to be pried out,
and today a man in Florida was arrested for trying to roll
across the Atlantic in a giant hamster wheel.
Sometimes I wonder about evolution and whether
a species can regress. What would our ancestors think
of us in these terrible, metal machines, together
on this road every day, getting nowhere?
Something always holds us up—if it’s not
the weather, it’s an accident, and this highway
always seems to need repairs.
I turn my audiobook off and listen
to the sound of my car wheels spinning
against the broken road. A man in the Toyota
next to me clutches his steering wheel.
Staring ahead, he leans in, hard.
We do our best to adapt. I have been patient,
waiting for the lighter version of Rhonda to appear.
I want her to know I’m rooting for her.

______________________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as Poet Laureate for Milford, CT; editor-in-chief for Harbor Review; and as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.

by Joan Kwon Glass

We ride the train into Manhattan
to see the Broadway show Hadestown,
and I wonder how anyone can call this story
romantic. All I can think about is how stupid
Orpheus is—so close to a happily-ever-after,
and he fucked it up like only a man tragically can.
All he had to do was walk out of hell with her
long enough to be worthy of love.

Later, at a new Dada exhibit,
we stand in a room where our footsteps echo,
where we don’t have language to name anything,
not even each other. Anything can
be art, even the space between us.
By sundown, it feels like we’ve walked
every inch of the city and the miles ache
my feet into remembering that I am
connected to my body,
the body I try so hard not to feel,
the body that you long to devour.

Above Times Square, a naked J. Lo gazes down
at me, advertising her skincare line,
sewer steam rising against her golden thighs,
her body seems to ooze onto these swollen streets.
She insists that I too, can (should) GLO.
What JLo’s love life has taught me over the years
is that if you are in a position to start over,
why wouldn’t you?
I’ve always silently cheered for her
when she left one man for another,
shook my head when she went back to Ben.
I long for the women in movies to have an exit plan,
wish they could sense danger the way I always do.

When I read that Olivia Newton-John has died,
I imagine Frenchie comforting the mourners
and Rizzo, stoic, in dark sunglasses,
ahead of me in line at Sandy’s wake.
I want to ask her if she kicked Kinickie
to the curb after that stupid carnival,
why she didn’t prevent Frenchie from giving
Sandy that makeover, a transformation I
never found believable.
Why they let her disappear into the clouds
in that pink convertible with no way
to change her mind, nowhere to land.

I still know all of the lyrics to Hopelessly Devoted.
I sang them in the fourth-grade talent show
and the translucent moon we hung from the ceiling
floated down onto the stage like a white flag.
I didn’t reach up to stop it, just tried not to watch it fall.
Sometimes I like to see how long I can
go without touching a man,
just to show him it’s possible.

______________________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of Night Swim (2022), winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, and three chapbooks. She serves as Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, as a Brooklyn Poets Mentor, and as Poet Laureate of Milford, CT. Joan teaches on the faculty of Hudson Valley Writers Center and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), RHINO, Dialogist, and elsewhere.

by Joan Kwon Glass

When my father left,
his old leather couch
kept his shape.
When I climbed up
in my Sunday dress,
it was safe.
His absence held me
like a throne.

He was dead, or gone.
My mother saw me, or not.
Jesus was coming
or he wasn’t.
Eventually, it didn’t matter.

What mattered was my body
perched on the hill
behind our house
atop the emptying field
in spite of everything,

What mattered were the unseen
creatures that burrowed
beneath the hill, grinding forward
in the darkness.

What mattered was the familiar
hum of my own hunger,
how long I could go
without

as somewhere else,
loaves and fishes
multiplied.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial (Korean/Caucasian) second generation American who lives near New Haven, CT. Her poems have recently been published or are upcoming in Sublunary Review, FEED, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Review, Rise Up Review, Dying Dahlia Review, Black Napkin Press, Vagabond City Lit, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Literary Mama, the print anthology Shimmer Spring, and others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.