We're getting poetic up here. It's time for another installment of Angry Poetry Corner, a regular weekly spotlight on the work of API poets -- not necessarily angry -- curated by Cara, our Angry Asian Intern. Because you could use a little more poetry in your life.In the corner this week, a poem by Christy NaMee Eriksen:
How to Tell if a Korean Woman Loves YouChristy NaMee Eriksen is a Korean Adoptee spoken word artist, organizer, and educator based in Juneau, Alaska. She's performed on some awesome stages, including The Roundhouse in London and Equilibrium’s spoken word series in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder and co-host of a monthly community poetry slam, and a 2011 JAHC Individual Artist Grant recipient.
If a Korean woman cleans her mind out in the spring
and you are still in it,
she loves you.
If you buy a Korean woman some flowers
and she lets them die slow painful deaths in a vase on her table,
stems limp, crispy petals weak to the most passive of breaths
and she has yet to see them lose their luster,
she smells them in her sleep,
she loves you.
If you walk out of a Korean woman’s kitchen
and there is rice on your sock
she loves you.
If you’ve never seen a Korean woman sing in the rain,
only recite poems from the
purple cursive of her veins,
translated verbatim
nerve after crooked nerve,
If you are a bomb
with a kindled tick
and she has not walked away,
If you find a boat in your bedroom
that she carried home from a rummaged shore
and refuses to call broken,
If her heart is the shape of the border
and some days she can’t step across it,
If there is only one comet
and only one telescope
and only one her
and only one you
and she passes the view,
she loves you,
and she can see the stars from here.
