Featured Poet Joan Kwon Glass
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Joan Kwon Glass, author of “How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy” (Harbor Editions, 2022) was a finalist for the 2021 Subnivean Award, a finalist for the 2021 Lumiere Review Writing Contest and serves as Poet Laureate (2021-2025) for the city of Milford, CT. She is a biracial Korean American who holds a B.A. & M.A.T. from Smith College, is Poetry Co-Editor for West Trestle Review & Poetry Reader for Rogue Agent. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, the Subnivean, Trampset, Rust & Moth, Rattle, Mom Egg, SWWIM, Honey Literary, Lumiere Review, Lantern Review, Literary Mama, Barnstorm & others. Since 2018, Joan has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She tweets @joanpglass and you may read her previously published work on her website.
Questions For My Mother
I want to ask
when he questioned you about heaven
why did you choose angels
you could have pointed
to the tulips opening
why didn’t you call for help
as soon as you heard the gunshot
I mean how can a gunshot in the next room
sound like anything other than a gunshot
what if we’d written his obituary to say
who he might have been
and listed those who failed him
instead of naming his survivors
how can you still spend every Sunday
reading those stories about men
who give up their firstborn
to prove their love for a God
who does not intervene
Instead I ask
why do you keep buying orange juice
for my children when it has so much sugar
their adult teeth have grown in
they still have their whole lives
ahead of them
Chambered Nautilus
A woman sits up weary in her nightdress,
holds her knees, dying in bed,
a basket of something unspooling beside her.
She turns toward the window and by the way light
floods the glass we assume she gazes out onto the sea.
At the foot of the bed, the chambered nautilus waits.
I bought this print twenty years ago, the glass cracked
from being moved and rehung so often,
dropped at some point over time.
The dying woman, Wyeth’s mother-in-law,
has remained with me through half my life:
two divorces, three children grown,
the carrying on after unbearable loss.
The old woman whose face I wouldn’t recognize
does not bear witness, but she never leaves me.
The morning I found out that my sister was gone
she watched the ocean chip away at the shore.
My sister stood beside me when I first saw it
on our trip to the Wyeth homestead in Maine.
We promised each other we would meet here again
someday when we were old and love had failed us.
She told me I should buy a print.
Christine was her pick, a woman crawling and reaching
for home, her numb legs dragging behind her,
pointer finger raised and wavering like a broken compass.
I chose Chambered Nautilus. No longing for arrival,
just a turning away from the room where your life will end
and toward whatever light the world still holds.