Halmoni
Bo Schwabacher
Facing the East, my halmoni
and omma, knew the ancestral
rites that feed the future,
how to let me go. My halmoni
may not speak Korean either.
My halmoni may be alive. I felt
each minute—a young girl smiles
back at her captor. Unsafe inside
my omma (her frame small), everything
showing—hills of green tea, rain
dissipating a stuffy summer—two
separate loves should have been:
Daddy/my romantic partner/night
and death sound similar in Japanese.
In my family, the women couldn’t afford
a dish from Japan, now popular
in our hometown—dried in the wind
from the sea, gulbi is dunked in green tea
water, borigulbi is said to “restore
the appetite.” A captor is someone
who forces his will on you,
and you accept each violation
because your life depends on it.
Bo Schwabacher is an adoptee from South Korea. Her poems have appeared in CutBank, Radar, Redivider, the Offing, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.