This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass (Perugia Press 2024).
Agnostic as Young Girl
Every Sunday evening a small group of us
came back to church for more.
Our parents in a lamplit room downstairs
took Bible study while we the children
of God’s most devout gathered
in the fellowship hall to watch videos
on the Tribulation and Rapture,
to learn that eventually we would run out
of chances, that even God had his limits.
It was the year of my first kiss
behind the stairs when the pastor’s meek,
orange-haired son was kind enough
not to turn away from me.
One night I asked the youth pastor to rewind the tape
back to the moment when a non-believer wakes up
to his entire family disappeared:
their clothing and shoes in heaps on the ground.
Not ghosts, just gone.
For a full minute I examined this young actor’s face,
rooting for him like my life depended on it,
saying over and over, I believe, I believe.
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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