Copenhagen
Copenhagen with a cold,
sick enough to buy
a Fisherman’s sweater
in blue, the yarn twined like crests
of waves, but it does not
turn me blonde.
Whiteness prevails
or so the light announces,
carving a tunnel through
the coastal room.
The inexplicable seashell
on the nightstand
surrounded by inexplicable
grains of sand
in this inexplicable coastal room
deep inland
cheers me.
Delphinium
and hyacinths are braided
into my hair; my mouth
a lilypad. You pay the bill
for two sixty-dollar bowls of soup.
But we haven’t been to Copenhagen,
you say, later,
and it’s a disappointing response
to a poem. I string the shell
around my neck
to hold my voice.
But I’m not a mermaid.
Thin, crepuscular and pink
with freckles, the shell
that I steal, worn on a gold chain
over my blue sweater,
strangely makes my heart bubble over
when I glimpse it
in the mirror. O shell,
life has spat you out
but you are mine now
and I feel like I can sing!
Alison Roman
When I go outside, it sorrows.
I am a heart behind a tree.
Once, mother chased a little ecstasy
like a squirrel up a tree.
She was unlike herself now.
Free as a virgin voyager,
her open mouth smells like
milk flowers. Like a statue
weeping in the rain,
like a voice with thin arms,
like stairs descending into water,
her old, real self is a figment,
just the memory of a feeling
far, far away from the two of us in this room.
She lies like a saint in her box.
She can be whoever I want her to be.
I pull a silk robe over her arms
and pat La Mer over her ivory face.
I play The Love for Three Oranges
on the record player.
I read her poems about orange blossoms
on a hotel balcony. I tell her I poached halibut
in tomatoes with herbs and chili oil,
an Alison Roman recipe. Like everyone else,
Mother can be happy at times, and charming,
so that all the bellhops fall in love with her.
Waiting is living in a stone.
If I tell myself this is how it is,
it becomes how it is, right?
Mother is lovely, inside and out.
When a true lady dies,
she leaves a pearl in her ashes.
This is true for monks.
It must be true for women like my mother.
Returning to mother, to where
I come from, I leave behind everything
I could not say.
Head on the wall my hair makes a paper sound.
I could fold the sound in my throat.
I could put it in an envelope.
Christine Kwon is the author of the poetry collection A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, which won the 2022 Cowles Poetry Book Prize. She received a BA from Yale and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, and Copper Nickel. She lives in New Orleans.
Instagram: @theschooloflonging
