05-09-2025
Joan Kwon Glass
ROOSTER BO
Y SURVIVES IN THE DMZ CIVILIAN CONTROL ZONE
She says you had red hair, like a rooster.
Red like your father’s hair, a G.I. from Kentucky
who never knew you’d been conceived.
She told me about you when I was twenty-five
and I imagined you still alive somewhere,
part rooster, part boy, a creature of two
worlds, a creature of nowhere. How do you
mourn
someone you’ve never met?
When I read about the DMZ Civilian Control Zone,
I know this is where you must be now,
this strange horizon of cosmos, abandoned Earth
and armistice line where in the absence
of human life, in the 150 miles of wild landscape
untouched for decades, over a hundred endangered
species thrive. The Asiatic black bears teach you how to
climb inside bunkers that punctuate hills like open eyes,
how to sleep deeply in the unbound world. Long-tailed
gorals show you how feed
on grassy ridges, hide from danger
in the rocky hillside crevices.
Comfort women pause in their wandering
to rock you in their pale arms, sing to you
and clean your feathers. White-naped cranes
with rings around their eyes red as an Imjin River dawn
tell you how to pick through the swamps and fields for
rice, how to be still beneath the sun,
hold your head high as though the light
here exists only for you.
FAIRY TALE
In this version I do not bury you in the black dress, the one with the tags still on that you hung on
the outside of your closet door. A dress you wouldn’t have been caught dead in when you were
alive (do you see what I did there?). Death is absurd enough as it is, so I guess I’m sorry for
making bad jokes, but lately, they’re all I’ve got.
You were never one to laugh at my jokes unless they were truly funny. I could count on this
about you. I counted on your rage too. It struck like lightning, and I was the cowering tree. You
could always quit smoking without trying. Either total control, or none at all.
I read a poem this week about two women laughing over what to wear to a funeral. As if a
funeral is an event, like a tea party or concert. How should we wear our hair? What is the right
outfit to wear to honor a life? Which shoes?
In this version, I bury you in your favorite Halloween costume, the Cheshire Cat one, with a grin
painted on where your mouth is. I adorn your body with every piece of jewelry you own instead
of saving it for your daughter like you ask.
Once upon a time, my sister was born. She was loved, in all of the ways she longed to be loved.
A doctor prescribed the medications that would finally help her, and she didn’t ghost him. She
never bought the gun, never stored it, loaded, in her nightstand. Her child never found it.
Julia, in this version, I don’t bury you at all.
ARMISTICE
Where are you going? Where are you going?
Over the mountain pass, pass,
I will climb it alone.
Mountain bunny, bunny / Where are you going? / … Where are you going? //
Over the mountain pass, pass, / I will climb it alone.
From the children’s song “산토끼” (“Santoki”)
As children, we sang a Korean nursery rhyme about a lone rabbit
who ascends a mountain. None of us can remember
learning this song, but all of us know it by heart.
We root for the rabbit, bouncing her way toward the clouds,
determined, stopping to sniff the not-yet-frozen ground for fallen chestnuts.
On my pre-war map of Korea, the peninsula resembles a hare,
steadying herself on hind legs, daughter of three gone kingdoms. She
gazes warily to the west, front paws vigilant in front of her. I point this out
to my students, American twelve-year-olds who are already learning to
armistice themselves, determining which wars to surrender, which
mountains to conquer. If given the choice between going
back in time or into the future, I choose to defy gravity. From
here, islands pepper the East Sea, specks unknowable.
From here, the DMZ is just the trail of a ghost cloud grazing
Earth with her ghost feet, in search of something she can almost
remember, might still imagine.
Pulling down a modern world map over Korea, I ask my students, If
you could choose to live anywhere in the world, where would you go?
One girl, a recent immigrant from Turkey, chooses an island,
barely visible. When I ask why, she says, I think there would be less
war on an island. I would be safer there.
As children, we dreamed the rabbit fat with survival.
Now, we teach our own children that home will appear if
they just believe. In the song, we never find out
if the hare makes it to the summit. Even so, we sing it,
raise our hands, fingers hooked in the shape of ears.
We hop, smile, tell our children to climb,
show them how to lift chestnuts from the ravaged ground.
None of us can remember learning this song, but all of us
know it by heart.
-from Daughter of Three Kingdoms (PerugiaPress), celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean diasporic author of DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS (winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize) & NIGHT SWIM (winner of the 2022 Diode Editions Book Award), as well as the chapbooks HOW TO MAKE PANCAKES FOR A DEAD BOY (Harbor Editions, 2022) & IF RUST CAN GROW ON THE MOON (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Her books & poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Slowdown & Rattlecast. Joan has been a finalist for the Poetry Northwest Possession Sound Series, the Tupelo Helena Whitehill Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize & the Subnivean Award & her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Terrain, Ninth Letter, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, AAWW (The Margins), RHINO, Rattle & elsewhere. Joan teaches for writing centers across the country, including Brooklyn Poets, Writing Workshops, Hudson Valley Writers Workshop & Corporeal & will be a 2025 guest speaker, guest writer or writer-in-residence at SWIMM, Amherst College, Smith College, Wesleyan University, & Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. She is available for manuscript consultations, residencies, readings, speaking engagements & workshops.