Lea (Speak to Oranges)
Lea knows the bigger oranges are
“daddy oranges,” the smaller ones, “baby
oranges.” The juice drips down her chin
the way fruit fell from the neighbor’s tree,
rotting in the alleyway between
until I mailed a demand letter
to next door, undeliverable,
returned, gave up, accepted I had
to clean a mess I had not created.
Now we harvest them throughout
the winter, a small fraction of
the citrus she consumes daily.
Does she remember the first time she fell
asleep next to me, no cries for mom, or
was it just a night she fell asleep? What
does our inner monologue sound like
when we lack the faculty for language?
Do the daddy oranges scream when cut,
when juiced, when the baby oranges roll
off the table and down the floor, bruised,
leaving precious little time to drink
their fluids before bacteria
and disease return them to the earth?
Baduk
Like chess, I learned baduk
alone, at odd hours of the night,
absorbing theory like it was
ethanol, liberating me from my
previous ignorance and inability.
Stacked on a cardboard box
filled with books, the board
sometimes doubled as a
mousepad, my apartment had
no furniture, I needed to erase
the lesson to email my mother
or check the news for items
sufficiently enraging to encourage
further, and deeper, study.
In moments of extreme hunger,
I began gnawing the stones,
first for flavor, later for
nutrition. I always preferred black
for its absence of handicap, found it
both crunchier and chewier, with
a hint of licorice. White was
something tolerated, like a mint
after vodka for breakfast,
something no one really liked.
Mi-Seong K’ong is a Norwegian-American who was given a Korean woman’s name at an archery range in Jeonju in the late 2000s. He was one of the first people to organize a haiku slam in the United States and a regular judge at the San Diego Poetry Slam, where he was frequently booed by the audience for the low scores he gave. His work has appeared in Frostwriting, Every Second Sunday, Eighty Percent Magazine, and various other now-defunct sources.
Lea knows the bigger oranges are
“daddy oranges,” the smaller ones, “baby
oranges.” The juice drips down her chin
the way fruit fell from the neighbor’s tree,
rotting in the alleyway between
until I mailed a demand letter
to next door, undeliverable,
returned, gave up, accepted I had
to clean a mess I had not created.
Now we harvest them throughout
the winter, a small fraction of
the citrus she consumes daily.
Does she remember the first time she fell
asleep next to me, no cries for mom, or
was it just a night she fell asleep? What
does our inner monologue sound like
when we lack the faculty for language?
Do the daddy oranges scream when cut,
when juiced, when the baby oranges roll
off the table and down the floor, bruised,
leaving precious little time to drink
their fluids before bacteria
and disease return them to the earth?
Baduk
Like chess, I learned baduk
alone, at odd hours of the night,
absorbing theory like it was
ethanol, liberating me from my
previous ignorance and inability.
Stacked on a cardboard box
filled with books, the board
sometimes doubled as a
mousepad, my apartment had
no furniture, I needed to erase
the lesson to email my mother
or check the news for items
sufficiently enraging to encourage
further, and deeper, study.
In moments of extreme hunger,
I began gnawing the stones,
first for flavor, later for
nutrition. I always preferred black
for its absence of handicap, found it
both crunchier and chewier, with
a hint of licorice. White was
something tolerated, like a mint
after vodka for breakfast,
something no one really liked.
Mi-Seong K’ong is a Norwegian-American who was given a Korean woman’s name at an archery range in Jeonju in the late 2000s. He was one of the first people to organize a haiku slam in the United States and a regular judge at the San Diego Poetry Slam, where he was frequently booed by the audience for the low scores he gave. His work has appeared in Frostwriting, Every Second Sunday, Eighty Percent Magazine, and various other now-defunct sources.
