Poetry: “Ars Poetica for a Non-Native Speaker” by Meg Kim

Ars Poetica for a Non-Native Speaker

My father, fresh out of residency,
was placed in a Koreatown branch of Cedars
in an initiative to extend their service
to the neighborhood.

He had the right face, the right stale
sounds crowning his molars.

Service is what I said.

He translated, profit.

I haunt the alleys
of all my failures praying
for the virtue of precision.

He stayed a year in Koreatown,
with one other Korean physician. Neither
bought groceries there, neither dreamed
there in the dark. The branch folded.

Market was saturated, he said.

Not: a conversation entered me and found me unlivable.

It is so easy to be the dull blade
bloodying the thumb of another.

Last year, my father sent me
a whetstone for my birthday.
I understood
what was required of me.

About Meg Kim

Meg Kim is a writer from Southern Oregon currently based in Chicago. Her debut chapbook, Invisible Cartographies, is forthcoming with New Delta Review, and her poems are published in The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and TriQuarterly, among others. You can find her online at meghaekyongkim.com.