MiPOesias Magazine 2007 - Asian-American Issue

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

KISAENG

"I want to understand the joy I felt as I was letting him go"

-Hwang Jini

As I listened to the fabric of his jacket assume the casual shape of leave taking,

I learned how to unhinge form from breath unbind and unknot the numinous black,

so again I was a woman & an artist whose ravens fell onto the ondol floor

like cords, not a suicide's hair floating in a village well & souring the water.

Callous on my finger, cushion for the kayabam, we shall pluck the string to forget triumphs

before royalty taxing us for a celadon barge, shall weep princes' names into a crevice

where we store besotted & sudden proposals to suck a jujube's succulent orb,

as if we required their directions to resist the stone in which a waiting life will crack

a rooting. Tendril of song, evening calm, guide my sense of use across the instrument

transforming my desire for vengeance into forest hearth smoke from which I fled

as a pretty child, selected by the king's men. Help me never to forget the elation I felt

when my first patron swore by the river's force his love for me, & I understood its swelling

to rush & breach could teach me to survive it by emptying myself to play a perfect note.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs has published poems in 5 AM, Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Poetry NZ, Tulane Review, Echoes Upon Eches (Temple UP 2003), and Contemporary Voices from the Eastern World: An Anthology of Poems (W.W. Norton 2007). Her poetry has appeared on radio and in film, and her song-cycle collaborations with classical music composers have debuted in New York and Los Angeles. She currently teaches honors writing courses at the University of Southern California, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing Program. She is this year’s winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her first book Paper Pavilions.