Just twenty-seven years old, a small-town Midwesterner, I spend the morning teaching English conversation at a language school near Gangnam. The 6 AM class bristles with businessmen, bosses with white hair, suits, and a lingering smell of cigarettes. Rows of brown eyes glare. They regard me defiantly, Confucian notions of age and hierarchy clashing with low-intermediate language skills and a deep need to save face. Each of them has paid good money to practice English, has arisen from bed at least an hour early for it, yet no one will open his mouth.
The 7 AM class is the same.
In the 11 AM class, though, the atmosphere shifts entirely. Brown eyes smile, invite. The students here are rich housewives and retirees, a cohort that’s been together in this class for months or even years, and it feels like a social club.…
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The old man says a child
that loses his home only hangs
his sack of misery around his neck.
This country turns me on my legs
like bats and has bleached me
clean of all the midnight dreams.
The spring flowers here have lost
their early morning grace.
I think of redemption in a foreign
river, to immerse my body in this water
and tell my mother to witness my baptism.
The old man says wherever a snail inches
it carries its home along and sometimes
that is the only song you need to know.
– Salawu Olajide…
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What colors paint
pandemic?
The wood pallette,
streaked with some
dried oils that
stubbornly defied
turpentine, did not
want darkness and
fear hues. Sable
brushes with a
faint odor of linseed
oil stood ready.
Protective mask,
fitted vinyl gloves
seemed out of place
near an easel used
to hold stretched
canvas. Fear, in
twenty-twenty,
would not be
recorded by my
tools. I opened
the tube of cadmium
yellow squeezing
sunlight instead
of anxiety.
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This poem was first published in May 2020 by Scarlet Leaf Review.…
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Krish Dhar scrunched into his window seat on the cramped Air Canada jet. His business required travel from Southern California to Phoenix eight times a year. The return flight took roughly seventy-five minutes. Easy most trips. A good chance to stare into space and mull over things.
Krish watched attractive women board the plane and manage the slim passageway. A brief juncture of hope, of possibility. For whatever reason, they were never ticketed next to him. No, he consistently endured giant, long-legged fellows as neighbors, or sweaty, glandular men who needed the auxiliary seat belt strap to secure them from careening about the cabin. If a woman ever sat next to Krish, it was a besieged mother wrestling with a mewling infant who smelled of soiled diapers and Gerber’s baby food.…
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for Bruce
We have lived long enough in this house
to have filled it to bursting
with all we no longer need,
long enough
that the silver on the back of the bathroom mirror
has begun to flake away with age.
I don’t really mind that it’s flawed,
like so much else,
but you find a mirror to replace it
and ask my help to take the old one down.
It leaves a mirror-shaped blank
on the bathroom wall
over the sink where we taught our daughters
to wash their hands and brush their teeth.
Then you bring in the new mirror,
pristine, unaged,
and I help you hoist it,
our two faces looking grimly back at us again
as we measure to be sure it’s even
and fasten it in place. …
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A twenty-nine-year-old photo of Charlie Company hangs on the wall in my basement. We’re standing at attention in rows on aluminum bleachers wearing our pristine tropical blue dress uniforms; the standard shot for Coast Guard recruits who’re about to complete basic training. Our Company Commander, a stout muscular black man with mirrored sunglasses, stands dead center in front of his platoon—and the gender disparity is chilling. Three female recruits survived the eight-week-long training session. They’re easy to single out due to their covers because they’re a lot different than the men’s, which civilians often mistook for old-time bus drivers’ caps.
In the last week of June 1991, ten or so women arrived at Coast Guard Training Center Cape May New Jersey. They filed off the buses with duffle bags in hand like the rest of us, eager to become part of the world’s most elite maritime service.…
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I read that once in a while one must look
up into the tree branches & glimpse the stars
scrawled on the leaves’ pale underbellies.
The book says the ocean eats itself everyday,
coral & nematodes clinging to each other
against the scraping teeth of wave on wave.
I must live the life of the aesthetic
fortune reader, tea leaves for breakfast,
clamshells before bedtime, a silken shawl
on my shoulders to draw to myself
when the ghost in the fireplace howls.
The book taught me love must grow
in the damp places of the earth, mold
& mushrooms spreading out in rings,
spirals of moist heat, bugs crawling
upwards to find the sun, a million writhing
things pushing up through the loam & rot,
with nutrients in their mouths
& love escaping from their breath.…
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