Allegiance

Kate Choi, South Korea

I sit down, write SoKo in Serif at the top

of the page. (S: nineteenth letter. Here, doing

the same work as the thirty-eight parallel).

Cursor blank. Click at another half-chewed draft.

Do not metaphor dumpster scraps. Words will list

to the side, right-justified. Let them engorge.

Flitting in front of the font bar, lotus-women leap

off lines, skirts bullet-holed, bodies uncolonized.

I sit, dog-ear a page, polish it off, finish the job.

My wreckage poems are bones and Zoloft—infanthood,

my country sucked on cannons to keep warm. Still,

the space below SoKo is firing blanks. Spiteful, I sow

new seeds: Ghazal Begging for Adderall. God Bless

High School, Ode to Carpal Tunnel. Out of all coin,

my country traded youth. Days defined by #s: # of

hours studied. # of clubs founded. # of designer bags.

# of skipped meals. #1 debate champion. #다음은너야*

bridge-rail hot, topping YouTube charts. There is no place

for a poet in the sharp-petaled East-Asian Dream.

Saturday, an aunt’s laughter screeching up a car-tire

octave. The magnolia of pride one shade lighter

than jealousy. Phone passed like raided artifact. Here,

acceptance is not earned, but taken. Here, blood

runs thicker than water, but never thicker than the soju

when so-and-so got into SNU. No, my country is not

Cain, red-skinned sibling, but who forged the hoe

that killed Abel? Twelve-o-clock, they announce another

bridge will be netted. How I long to dig into gold-rush

dust, burrow those river-children back into the womb.

Instead, I watch as fluorescent jackets pull them into

a one-armed embrace, and think of the lotus women.

*Translation: #You’reNext, a hashtag used by the generation scheduled to take South Korea’s

notorious college entrance exam.

Kate Choi is a creative writer from Seoul, South Korea. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and Adroit Summer Mentorship, her work is published or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, ONEART, and manywor(l)ds. She works as a poetry reader for Ploughshares and Twin Bird Review. You can find her online at https://katechoi.carrd.co/.