This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass (Perugia Press 2024).
Spittle-Eating Hungry Ghost 食唾鬼 㖉吒
During the occupation,
a Japanese soldier spat
at my grandmother’s feet
then waited for her to dare
unbow her head. She did not.
And he moved on.
From then on she would
see spit on the ground
and remember that she could endure
shame if it meant that when it passed,
she was still standing.
Joan Kwon Glass is a Korean diasporic author, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, and author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022), as well as the chapbooks How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Her poems have been featured in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Slowdown, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut where she is a public school educator, and she teaches poetry at writing centers throughout the country.
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. She’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
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