This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from ASTERISM by Ae Hee Lee (Tupelo Press 2024).
Korea :: Things to Review Before Landing
My origin story:
My mother found me as a chestnut dangling from a
tree. When I fell onto her lap, she was eating
a copper pear with one hand, paging through
a book with the other. She carried out the burr
in the hollow of her arms; the spiny cupule made her
bleed, but she didn’t surrender me until I dropped
from the shell. Later, I sprouted needles anew, afraid
I was being nibbled away by the world.
My grandfather’s name:
I thought my grandfather’s name was Hal-abeoji,
only to find out it was the Korean word for
grandfather. He was the one who taught me and my
sister to sail a paper kite over a frozen river, to allow
my index to flirt with its mercurial tail.
An idiom:
When I was given a norigae to hang
under my first hanbok jacket, I foresaw
a pendulous love in my life. I alternated
between laughing and sobbing. Short horns
appeared on my back. From then on, a child-like
misfortune took the shape of a blank page and
muffled my steps in every new country I called
home. I didn’t want her at first, but eventually grew
fond of her, held her hand when she cried at night.
A road:
The one I took to school when I lived in Jang-yu
for that one year. I studied the occasional
bush of forsythias on the side prodding yellow against
an absolute autumn sky.
Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee is the author of ASTERISM, selected by John Murillo for the 2022 Dorset Prize, and the poetry chapbooks Bedtime || Riverbed, Dear bear, and Connotary, the last of which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her work can be found at The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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