by Trish Broome
Mom is sitting cross-legged on the hard kitchen floor,
slicing cabbage and green onions for kimchi,
covering her mouth as she laughs.
She’s watching 7-year-old me in the living room,
lip-syncing to Madonna and Whitney Houston,
holding my Walkman like a microphone,
grabbing my shiny Michael Jackson glove suspenders,
pretending I am the next winner on Star Search.
My brother, who is two years older, is
practicing taekwondo with G.I. Joe action figures.
A few feet away on the couch, dad’s holding
a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other,
watching a scary VHS tape he rented for the weekend.
Mom is still angry at him for showing us The Exorcist,
but that’s how we spend quality time together.
To be together.
The year before the 1988 Seoul Olympics,
we leave with mom for America.
There will be no more walking off base to open street markets
where vendors sell made-to-order spicy rice cakes, or
giving my allowance to that elderly Korean lady who sells
packs of Juicy Fruit gum from a broken hand basket.
I will never again squat on a dirty public bathroom floor,
or be taunted by Korean school girls for being a “mutt.”
My brother and I will miss the walk to school,
past the movie theater where we saw Return of the Living Dead,
with other kids whose future is also unknown.
No more origami classes or writing our names in Korean.
Dad will stay where duty calls, while we move
to a city in Virginia nicknamed Bad News.
Heaven is no longer a place on earth.
We are no longer together.
Trish Broome is a half-Korean writer who currently lives in Maryland. Her poems have been featured in You Might Need to Hear This, Half and One, Cure Today, Yellow Arrow AMPLIFY Vignette, SLAM! Performance Poetry from the Underrepresented, Miscreant Anthology, and Novus Literary Arts Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Brooklyn to Gangnam Magazine, Unfinished Conversations, and Living Between Worlds: Multicultural Life, Love, and Pain. Her debut chapbook, titled Half Country, Half Seoul, is now available from Bottlecap Press. Another chapbook, titled Nine Months of Kimchi and Crying, will be released by Finishing Line Press in January 2027.
This poem previously appeared in Novus Literary.