​03-03-2025

​

Ed Bok Lee

​​

MITOCHONDRIAL EVENING

 

“One tiny piece of our DNA is inherited only down the female line. . . . 

Some molecular biologists say that, aeons ago, the mitochondrion was a free-living 

organism with its own DNA. . . .”

—“Mitochondrial DNA: The Eve Gene,” by Stephen Oppenheimer 

​

There is a woman and a man

naked inside me, though 

they have yet to properly meet. 

This started long ago, before 

time; before memory 

or art; when ocean caves 

were umbilical. The woman 

and man morphed over millennia, 

trading notochords and ectoderms,

but this remained constant: he loved

when the woman sang in joy, 

in sadness; he loved 

that he, the man, could never

enter into her voice without

leaving behind all he knew how to savage 

for their children. Eventually,

he fashioned a tail to better 

find her, and she more sensitive 

filaments and corona. His 

greatest gift, the shoulder 

he built to hurl slings. Soon, 

together, they willed the best vista

from the height of a mountain. 

Grottos filled with skulls.

Meanwhile, he honed consonants;

she polished her vowels. Time

hammered bronze to shield

safety from chaos. Still their children 

escaped through the days and years.  

Still the woman and man, mid-winter,

traded turns stomping off

into darkness. Fierce 

declarations. She within the man inside her 

daughters and sons could only 

listen to him paint

disturbing glyphs of his mother’s 

dreams. This man, you see, despite 

sharpened tools, did not yet understand 

no document is imperishable; 

any immutable covenant 

has no name. The woman 

suffocating in her own father’s nightmares 

invented faith. The man drowning 

in his mother’s grief cursed anyone fearful. 

Their children stoked the fire. Sometimes 

I hear them, my man and woman,

arguing, or making love,

it’s not always clear. One

woman inside me, my great

-great-grandmother, whispers 

to her lover on a straw mat

that one day they will escape 

to a beautiful country where 

people can marry whomever they wish.  

The one atop the other smiles, wonders

what it would be like far beyond

this family’s rice fields. Giggling

in the cellar of a pavilion, breaths

like fragrant soup, they kiss

then oversleep. 

 Far away, a distant

ancestor within my great-grandfather

is at war, fleeing barbarians, 

communists, giant hyenas, drones. 

Every decision he makes will determine 

eight percent of the planet’s chromosomes. 

One daughter inside him will love the lute

so well my ears slightly protrude. 

In a world ruled by women, the saying goes, 

there would be no war. At least one 

mean girl inside me is skeptical. 

The old man selling arrows, seeds, and 

parchment in my spine only really wants to skip 

stones across water. Everyone within his daughter’s 

wavy hair murmurs: it all depends 

on the quality of love inherited  

through one’s parents. 

  Where 

did any mother end and a father begin 

if all marriages not a century back

came with keys to her ovaries? For eons

the women inside me have taught 

their most prideful brothers how to let go. 

For eons the men inside me have

fought to burn and rebuild. To where, 

in which direction? asks

one to the other, now lost in a forest

fairy tale that slithers like syntax

confused. 

    In moonlight, a female 

shadow is entering herself. No. The male

is emerging from fate all alone. Have you 

ever heard a woman bayoneting a bear? 

A man weep in a maternity ward? 

The mustache-and-lingerie-wearing sphinx

inside both of us thinks women

are always cock-blocking the apocalypse.  

She straps on a cattle prod 

and chuckles with her fellow 

guards holding cameras and phones. The whore 

moaning in a hood on bloody cement 

unsheathes his hidden janbiya, 

readies the blade. Odds are strangers 

have assaulted multiple bodies 

still cowering in your DNA. Bodies burning 

past their future saints scheduled

to inspire millions of souls. It’s time

to revise the myth of purity

and innocence; the myth there can be 

no peace without war. Of course, 

the me in we loves to ennoble myself; 

loves to believe the human spirit always grows. 

Yet the sage inside every child knows 

in searching for the other: the woman 

inside the man inside the animal, you find 

truth, lies, and jealous rumors. 

                                     Still, at least one man  

enshrined in me is reluctant to track down 

his most she-wolf self. Several women in him are waiting 

for their sons to finally grow 

some teeth and move out of the basement. 

No. She can’t ponder a thing, is too busy walking past 

a broken streetlamp. Meanwhile, the man 

in my body watches through curtains 

a new, larger army, and questions

what all the girls will think if he doesn’t volunteer. 

No. He’s listening 

to his sisters already in uniform curse 

the end of gender, sex, race, and God as a machine

pumps their milk. 

                             There is a woman 

and a man naked inside me

who have yet to fully uncleave. 

This was long ago, before an abundance

of oxygen. Both reincarnated a wild 

bestiary of beings over eons, but this 

remained constant: the woman loved 

when all the fathers inside all their grandmothers inside all 

their grandchildren harmonized into songs

of sadness, joy, tribulations; loved 

when, each time, without fail, two lovers 

danced to any proscribed border’s edge, clutching 

their books and musical instruments, breathing

softly through all their most secret sins. 

                           Meanwhile, the old ones

searched for their teeth made of wood, acrylic, then gold 

in a rose bush under wild mistletoe. 

And to long for every girl’s laughter was to fly. 

And to fly was for every boy’s seeking never having to hide. 

There is a language within the man I am—dying 

at different speeds, the language

an ocean, the human a sea whose 

tributaries like frost on a window or vines 

on a wall only sometimes in places cross. 

I’m looking at one right now 

as the child I used to be. Or 

are they the veins in my mother’s 

womb. Or diffuse red

emissions from a cosmos too far away

to revise anything on this evening 

but my father’s iron

-ed burial clothes. 

​

SUPER-INSENSITIVE SPECIES 
 

“Asian carp [introduced to control weeds and parasites] have been crowding out native fish, compromising water quality and killing off sensitive species.”        

 

—FROM “INVASION USA: ASIAN CARP INVADERS HAVE TAKEN THE MISSISSIPPI, ARE THE GREAT LAKES NEXT?” IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

​

The Asian carp are on their way!

Thrumming waters, thrashing over dams midair. 

You American engineers who released us 

 

Into your streams and lakes, how could you forget

The Chinese Exclusion Act? Half-a-million 

Top-knots wishing not only to dig and blast, but breed? 

 

I am young and shiny in Prada at the mall. 

I am hunched at the bus stop, grease stained, smoky 

Lungs full of sad erhu songs. Wok & Rolling

 

Through your suburbs, sardine-like in a Honda. 

Hard down Wall Street on a Ducati rocket at 4 a.m., 

Paddle tennis rackets in my Gucci bag clattering.  

 

A Bel Air clinic designed to disguise how to reenvision 

This land of opportunity with even wider than Western eyes. 

Koreatown Peaceful Cloud on Snake Mountain tattoos. 

 

Myriad in late-night cram 

Schools of swishing bubbles like slitty 

Mermaids at your sailors’ hulls.  

 

Eating my own kind, even my own tail, to survive. 

Feel our silvery fins sting through sludge and slime. 

California and New York have long teemed with our disease. 

 

Milwaukee and Chicago, how will your shores survive 

Such frantic froth? From Olympia to Providence,  

It’s a new day, our forty-horsepower jaws so snappingly say, so

 

Bend over and drop your pants 

Because Asian Carp are on the way! 

Polishing your platinum ingots, boardroom doorknobs, and bylaws. 

 

Maybe not yet the Whitest House, but fast

Scaling ourselves clean on the jagged edges 

Of glass ceilings. Bottom dwelling 

 

In deepest cyberspace. Chomping up bargain real estate. 

How can the other fish possibly compete with no duck blood, 

Biryani, pad thai, or kalbi sinew stuck between their teeth?

 

Melting pot, O.K. But not my fish head, 

Not my GPA. Not my child’s yellow 

Lamborghini-shaped, Harvard-bound birthday cake. Reverse racism? 

 

Affirmative action? Quota? What you say? 

Nah. We don’t roll rigged games. 

Art of War jungle tunnels 

 

Through your mind is our way. 

And it’s too late for you to learn

How to play. Because the Asian carp 

 

Are on our way—dastaars turbaned

Like three times the brain; shoguns blazing

Chopsticks and perfect SAT scores like rain. 

 

Ancient saw-toothed devils shimmying up onto land

To squirm, crawl, stutter, walk about, and one day say:

Yo, where did all the Black 

 

Elks, Standing Bears, and Pocahontases go? 

Who rode off with all their horses, confiscating their guns? 

Who over-forested then pumped green muck into rivers, thinning the salmon? 

 

Whose sugar and cotton plantations enslaved? 

Who converted whose heathen souls to fill whose churches and factories? 

Who profited? Who outsourced? 

 

Who instituted internment, the H1B visa, and the KKK? 

Who bombed whose families’ flesh and bones in Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, 

     Iraq and Afghanistan 

Back to the “Stone Age”? 

 

Yes, the Asian Carp are on their way

And life as it’s known can’t help but change. 

But, really, if we must fish 

 

For euphemisms—who 

Brought whose eggs and minnows 

Here to invade whose waters, land, and 

 

Purity in the first place?

 

ULTRAVIOLET SHAMAN
 

Stop, says Seonsengnim, my drum
teacher in Seoul, tapping my wrist with his 

bamboo yeolchae stick, not hard
as when I was a boy in Mapo
and my tae kwon do instructor bruised
with nunchucks my upturned palms
for fighting at school.
                                  Remember, this drum
is a horse you’re galloping. . . Now, loosen up, and start again.
Seonsengnim is white haired,
formerly homeless, until a troupe
of much younger drummers found him
in his fifty-eighth year sleeping in a park
and taught him seoljanggu—its ancient
cadences for thirty centuries, which now
he teaches novices for a pittance. I observe
he crashes in this, their jerry-rigged
drumming studio in Edae, on the linoleum
beside a portable gas burner he places
a copper kettle atop as a makeshift humidifier.
He sips barley tea until the sun goes down
and a soju bottle comes out. Here, drink this
to oil your soul warm.
                             He has one student, me,
and a lazy eye, a weak gray mustache, and little education.
Soju, it helps you understand your horse. His father,
an infantryman, froze to death during the war,
and his mother disappeared when he was six, maybe escaped
or was kidnapped back to the North.
Now just another old man
with no friends and a childlike smile you see
wandering the streets of Seoul.
All right, that’s enough for today, my horse is tired. 
On Friday mornings he drum-dances solo
at orphanages and elderly centers: a cantering
dervish on horsehide and deerskin heads
stretched over hourglass-shaped 

paulownia wood; the deep
and simultaneous staccato rhythms long and intricate
enough to harken the Neolithic.
Drum patterns I keep forgetting
when I pound as if tracking tigers
on a damp trail through mountain mist.
Drifting off each night five subway stops away,
I strain to memorize the patterns, tapping out long
segments against my thighs in my jachwi room, rented
usually by the week for test preparation.
There is coarse mothball bedding; a communal
shower that whines and sprays only ice water; and a flickering
fluorescent tube over a study carrel
in what can only be described as a cell.
Law exams. College entrance exams. Medical school
exams. Police exams. Realtor exams. The occupants
sigh and groan and fart through the walls,
stretch stiff limbs in the dim halls
of this stressed-out land, highest 

suicide rate in the developed world.
Seoul.
          You, city where my earliest memories surge
into tanks cracking asphalt, sirens, martial
law over bullhorns, protests
and teargas each week on my way to kindergarten.
A South Korean military dictator who imprisoned and beat
poets like drums
until brain damaged into honorary jobs
in the propaganda department.
Seoul. You history of mortars
and rockets like monstrous shovels
exhuming ancestral bones.
                                          I have returned
to renovate my heart with a million
precolonial kidak strokes and pulsating googoongs.
Stored up all my belongings
in Brooklyn, sold my rusted Mercury,
and arrived to beat whatever I need
out of both you and me,
twelve hours a day. Sometimes
we skip meals and time-trot on, lost
in the DNA-yoke of powerful tempos.
                          On Sundays,
the studio’s professional crew returns
and together we all sit, rubbing knees and shoulders
to drum history into being—reanimating

the guttural chants of priests 

and rice farmers. Themes and 

variations long ago invented to help defeat 

the stooping tedium of seedlings in mushy fields; 

so the backbone doesn’t crack and seep
like the milky broth of oxtails and noodles
some nights we go around the corner to slurp
together, this old man and me, in sweat-soaked shirts.
He will die in six years.
He will wheeze through a cancerous lung,
his one good eye gone fishy dim.
But, I hear, he sat and drummed till the end.
                                                                     Often I go for months
without thinking of him; that winter
into spring; those few cherry blossom
branches quicker to bloom
for their proximity to a train line.
The walls where I live now
are all too thin, so, when I must, I drive 

to my office at night to thunder new light.
When the way won’t come.
And the dead shapes shine.
I drum
and think of the old, galloping Korean
who, one night over dried squid and beer,
confided he didn’t play for the small
studio’s leaky roof over his head;
he preferred bridges; did not play
for the meager wage; understood
the troupe’s leaders only assigned him the random 

hobbyists passing through. He knew 

he began the art way too late.
And that his hands would sometimes shake.
And he took too many smoke breaks.
He played, he claimed, for other 

reasons: spiritual but not
as prayer like all the churches
that ever fed and took him in
waited for him to do. Not for repentance
or supplication or sublime escape
or meditation.
                       We’re drumming,
he explained, in the tradition
of shamans,
so the ancestors won’t be so lonely.
Because the spirits need us
more than we need them.
And for hours
                       they’ll listen to anyone.
 

-from Mitochondrial DNA selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick, celebrated with the poet's permission

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Ed Bok Lee is the author of three books of poetry and prose, including Whorled, and Mitochondrial Night, as well as short stories, essays, and plays. Lee’s poetry has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Honors include an American Book Award, an Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice Award), a Minnesota Book Award, and a PEN/Open Book Award, among others. Lee attended kindergarten in Seoul, and studied and worked while attending university (at Minnesota, Yonsei (Seoul), Al-Farabi Kazakh National, Indiana, Berkeley, and Brown). With a background in local journalism and political theater, he is an associate professor at Metro State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and for over two decades has also translated literature and organized programming and taught in youth centers, prisons, public libraries, and other programs around the nation and beyond.