Things I Can’t Tell My Mother
photo by Puhin K
Today eomma soaks the rice for an hour
before our Cuckoo rice cooker (which is ten cups
full, even if she ordered the six-cup version)
compresses and envelopes smooth starch kernels
with boiling water and crescendos the steam shriek.
She broils the gulbi after dousing it with flour,
and lugs the kimchi jar from the local bunsik,
which also sells salty banchan and ppeongtwigi,
to our ten-year-old table. And I swallow bones,
too lazy to pick them out from my teeth,
willing to suffer for the sweet bits of fish leftover
even if the bones scratch my esophagus going down.
Today eomma asks about my poetry class.
It’s good, I reply, but leave out that my professor
is a scruffy woke cat man that fangirls over Ezra Pound
when the only pounds I know are the pounds of groceries
in thick green plastic bags I carry up flights of stairs,
or that he said I am teaching you with the expectation
you will be lifelong poets, one more lifelong to pile on
a funeral mound of expectations. I am already a lifelong
workhorse, lost Korean, daughter reeking of
filial duty. A lifelong Christian. A lifelong dog
noona to a dog who had a seizure that only lasted
one minute but shook my existence anyways.