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 draws
a blank. Click at another half-chewed draft.
Do not metaphor dumpster scraps. Words will list
to the side, right-justified. Let them engorge.

Flitting at the font bar, lotus-women leap off the
lines, skirts bullet-holed, bodies uncolonized. I sit,
dog-ear a page, polish it off. My wreckage poems
are collarbones 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 for Begging for Adderall. God Bless High School,
Carpal Tunnel and Cortisol. Out of all possible coin,
my country traded youth. Days defined by #s: # of
hours studied. # of clubs founded. # of people who voted
you as #1. # of designer bags. # of skipped meals.
#다음은너야* climbing YouTube charts. There is
no place for a poet in the East-Asian Dream.

E-string about to snap: an aunt’s laughter. Blood
runs thicker than water. Never thicker than soju flowing
when so-and-so got into SNU. No, my country is not
Abel, red-skinned sibling, but who forged the hoe

that killed Cain? 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.