home. my eastern peninsula is

the border between

the girl who screeches bohemian, like

the TSA agent who demands: huh,Korea? like

it’s a slur. that eight-letter word used

in American books written by J.D. Salinger, where girls love

to tag along like a beer-bent caterpillar,

defying their boyfriends, exist more masculinely, to mother’s

scorn.

because here, we don’t venerate freedom.

mother is a Confucian muse. together,

we flirt for brevity, STEM-prodigies and

we run after

favorable currency conversions blindly:

the plucked off tails of an American dream. so

we beat Western colonialism with

our wings, grown out from

rice-bones. in this poem

words, verses, stanzas, are forbidden gems:

I can equivocate as much as I want

like a nymph

but I am bound to this peninsula forever and

this poem is too short, too rare; and

no one can get me out of this blood-thick mess:

but one day i will leave this peninsula like the

mud that oozes over the strings,

whitewashed, but finally I will go home, thinking

of the Han river’s eyes. yes,i will bleed

profusely. scratch the wounds of my peninsula

but I will shed Oriental blood

into a nostalgic scab. Smiling

as I drown in the ribbon of my guts because

through the shrieks of my mom, I will learn that

American blood is warm,

home is not a Confucian ideology,

American blood pulses hot, viscous in me,

even more than a dream

when I leave this peninsula.

---

Ji Hyo Kim is an incoming first-year student and English Literature major at Harvard College. She was the first-place winner of the Letter Review Prize in Poetry, and her work has been recognized by the New York Times, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Eunoia Review, and the Beyond Words Magazine. She published her first poem orally in ninth grade through a podcast hosted by award-winning poet Mark Grist, and has been a mentee of Angela Chaidez Vincent under the Kenyon Review Workshops and an apprentice of the Adroit Summer Mentorship program.