Cover art: Through the Crack a Flight Breaks
Artist: Jen Stein

Introduction to Bloodline by Laura Lee Washburn

“and I want to run out of the room, out of this sorrowful year
and back, back, back to us sitting on the ondol floor
in our cotton pajamas in her house when I am five years old,
when no one is thinking about death”—Bloodline

Ten poems. Sit down and read. A microchap doesn’t take long, but when you finish Bloodline, you will have read a book. Joan Kwon Glass gives the gift of herself and her human heart and her human frailty in this collection. I’m repeatedly mystified after reading these ten poems that I have only read ten poems. Each time I finish the collection newly awed. The scope and breadth of Bloodline is so large, so honest, and so personal, that I feel I have left this Spacetime and entered another. How can Joan Kwon Glass transport me so expertly across continents and through time? In my youth, I was mystified by Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion.” I’m embarrassed to admit the certainty I felt about the world. Now I read “all we recognized through the spinning was each other,” and through the two sisters on roller skates, I, who have never had a sister, feel seen, and I remember, too, being five and my grandmother and “no one thinking about death.” Certainly, that’s how it was. Joan Kwon Glass affords us the opportunity to enter into the heart and spirit of the speaker of these poems, a person who writes unblinking of racism, of deep griefs, of the fragmented world, and I invite you to go with her in these poems where you will find, too, love.

Love centers this collection. I think of the child in Christmas/Troy, Michigan/1983. Where others might fear, the child walks toward the possibility of love. I think of the pearl in the oyster and the divers who for centuries upon centuries dove into depths looking.

Bloodline takes us to Jeju, to Seoul, to American living rooms, and through time, back to an 80’s childhood (The Fonz, Willy Wonka, roller skates in the basement), back to the turn of this century, and the wars of the 20th. We witness uprising, occupation, the brutal facts of occupation (“Nearly 200,000 girls and young women / disappeared into military brothels”), racism, and so many of the problems that cannot fail to be “dragg[ed] into the next generation.” Joan Kwon Glass is willing to explore identities, remember joy, and reckon and memorialize war ghosts. She understands that what we want and what we can have cannot often be reconciled, but that questions and lives are worth exploration: “When people are killed we always want answers, / as though murder should somehow make sense.” Child, sister, granddaughter, mother, Joan Kwon Glass comes to us with her heart open as a survivor who finds herself “most startled of all.”

1 /

Dear Ghosts of Jeju Uprising, 1948

It’s been forty years since you died resisting Korea’s division.
I am spending one summer here on the island with my grandmother
where tobacco-chewing 아저씨 sell red bean popsicles
and melon ice cream beneath hagyul trees.
I wander the beaches where since the Dark Ages pearl divers
have held their breath and submerged themselves in the Pacific,
retrieved what they found to sell or eat to keep their families alive.

When I grow tired of 오징어, abalone and rice
my grandmother finds a place that sells American food
and I gorge on pizza and plain hamburgers, tiny cans of Sprite
which Koreans always sip with a straw,
but I pour down my throat like an American.
From our room at the Hyatt I drift to sleep each night
as my grandmother says her christian prayers aloud in the bed next to me,
as the lily-scented warm wind outside my open window
perfumes my dreams of silver boats floating near the horizon.

I know only a few phrases in Korean:
that hurts/ may I please have strawberries/ I don’t understand.
My grandmother knows only hello and goodbye, yes and no.
One day I teach her to say fish but because in Korean there is no letter “f,”
it sounded like peesh. When I giggle at her she says it again
and we go on like that for a while, me trying to teach her
and she saying pish, peesh, pish, both of us laughing
until our eyes brim with saltwater.

Today, a guide leads tourists by Doteul cave.
In 1948 you hid here for sixty days, decided you’d had enough of war,
mostly farmers caught between sides, determined
to no longer belong to anyone but each other.
Ghosts of Jeju: if you could speak and I could understand you,
what would you say? Would you say hello, say it hurts, say pish
over and over until the boats cross the horizon, until I dream myself
into the cave where your moon-white bones stand together still,
in our still-divided country, roaring in every language.

2 /

Black Cows

Jeju Island, 1910-1945
During the occupation they burned our written history.
200,000 years of records. Gone.
They taxed the abalone that pearl divers had scoured
the ocean for since before the 1600s.
Nearly 200,000 girls and young women
disappeared into military brothels.
We were forced to worship Shinto gods,
speak only Japanese, take on Japanese names,
or there would be no rations.

The Japanese admired the black cattle
that had grazed Jeju’s fields since the Joseon dynasty,
that we’d revered as gods.
They declared black cows Japanese
and brown cows Korean.

Daegu, South Korea, 1988
I am 11 years old.
I ask my grandmother to tell me
what our Japanese surname was.

It is the only time in my life
that she ever slaps me.

Connecticut, U.S., 2004
My first child is born.
I choose Kwon for his middle name:
my grandmother’s maiden name,
the second name she forfeited.
She dies before meeting him.

Connecticut, U.S., 2006
A week before my daughter is born
I dream her as a girl with long, black hair
strung with pearls and seaweed
and wound around her head like a crown.
A pearl diver brings her to me
inside a mollusk.

Pyeongchang, 2018
It’s the eve of the winter Olympics.
The world watches as North and South march
together beneath the unification flag.
It’s taken sixty years but Jeju’s black cows
have repopulated the fields.

As the Japanese teams wave and smile at the crowd,
the NBC broadcaster says: every Korean
will tell you that Japan
has been an example of culture…
so important
in their own transformation.

When asked his thoughts on reparations,
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe tells reporters:
We should not drag this problem
into the next generation.

3 /

Happy Days

For most of kindergarten, Brad Mitchell whispered
Joanie Loves Cha-Chi and pulled his eyes back at me,
while his friends snickered. I was the only Asian girl
in school, and my name was Joan, not Becky or Chelsea
like the prettiest girls in class, the ones that smiled so freely.
My name was American, but not American enough.

That entire year, I thought Joanie Loves Cha-Chi was a racial slur.
My immigrant mother had never seen Happy Days.
Her kimchi and myeolchi-muchim was banished
to a garage refrigerator while our gigantic gallons of milk
and my father’s cheddar cheese and oreos filled the kitchen.

She waved away my tears and told me to just ignore them.
I was not American enough to get the joke.
The next year, I saw Happy Days on t.v.
Hooked right away, I fell in love with The Fonz.
I didn’t know then, but it was because he could say
“heyyyyyyy” in an accent that I couldn’t quite place.

4 /

Seoul Station to Daegu, 2001

In the stainless steel and cloudy glass,
blurry versions of myself resemble blobs of light.
They accompany me to the ticket counter
as I make my way through the turntables to the right track.
I ask for help in Korean, words that now, 20 years later,
I wouldn’t understand if spoken to me.

Soon my train will take me to Daegu.
On the way, cranes will land and pose in rice fields,
the timeless, solitary act of feeding themselves interrupted
only by our charging toward or away.
I’ll visit my grandmother in the hospital room
where she’ll cradle the white teddy bear I give her,
hold it too tightly and for too long until a lump grows in my throat
and I want to run out of the room, out of this sorrowful year
and back, back, back to us sitting on the ondol floor
in our cotton pajamas in her house when I am five years old,
when no one is thinking about death,
where strawberries in a big bowl on the floor
shine between us, waiting to be savored.

As I sit beside her hospital bed, it will take her
five full minutes to recognize me,
her eyes watering some distant garden.
I will watch my grandfather use one hand
to feed her bean sprouts with metal chopsticks,
the other hand to catch any drips of sesame oil,
so they don’t soil her gown or quiver on her chin.
In the end, they chose to love one another
in spite of the heartache, the disappointments.
I will not understand the miracle of this until much later in my life.

For now I wait for my train, watch a young mother
feed her baby with one hand, grasp her toddler’s shirt
with the other as he tries with all his might
like a tiny, screaming, red-faced bull, to get away.
I buy a paper triangle of ramen noodles from the railroad cart.
As it cools I try to remember the lyrics of a song
that my grandmother taught me as a child.
Something about butterflies and spring, and longing.

5 /

Christmas/ Troy, Michigan/ 1983

Every Christmas, my white grandfather drew the shades in the living room
and sat in his upholstered chair in the dark with a bottle of gin.

Since the shag carpet was that shade of olive green that everyone loved
in the 1980s, I would sometimes imagine a mushroom forest growing

around him. The television flickered like lightning so I could catch glimpses
of his face, grim and still, and sometimes a forest demon stood behind him

or crouched at his feet, drooling and grinning, baring its teeth.
The mushroom forest grew taller each time I glanced into the room

and suddenly I remembered the scene in Willy Wonka when Mike Teevee’s mom
reaches into a candy mushroom and scoops out whipped cream.

The year I turned seven I decided to venture into the living room
and smile my sweetest smile, see if I could get some whipped cream

from those mushrooms and prove to myself that the creatures I saw
in flashes weren’t real. While everyone else was in the kitchen,

I crept into the living room with my head down and stood in front
of my grandfather until his eyes, red and half closed turned toward me

and in a sudden lightning storm of liquor soured-breath,
he muttered get outta here you fuckin’ gook.

I could hear a rerun of Wheel of Fortune on the t.v. The wheel’s spokes
churned and spit. The audience applauded for what felt like forever.

6 /

Gold

This week scientists created something
resembling a human embryo.
They try to alchemize life as though it is a precious metal.

By Tuesday eight people are shot dead
outside Atlanta, six of them Asian.
My first thought is why did the killer do it?
My second thought is I hope
they pronounce their names correctly on television.

Three of the victims worked at Gold Spa.
Someone throws back a beer, makes a joke
about massage parlors and happy endings.
How many times has a man said to me
I’ve always had a thing for Asian women.

I want to pretend this isn’t about race,
that the women who are shot to death
don’t look like me, my mother, my daughter.
I try to ignore the fact that the killer
looks like my high school boyfriend.

When people are killed we always want answers,
as though murder should somehow make sense.
But Spacetime doesn’t account for who we lose
or how, or why.
All of the gold we will know has already fallen
to Earth on the backs of dead stars.

This week, scientists work tirelessly, hoping
for a breakthrough, try to understand what they’re missing
when it comes to making human beings.
They ask, how does a cell become human?

They ask, what goes wrong?

7 /

Dear Julia

Do you remember roller-skating in the basement on snow days?
We stumbled and soared, our feet heavy and strange.
Outside the tiny window, the Michigan sky confessed its sins,
a basket turned over and shook, covering everything.
Or how about that summer at halmani’s house in Korea?
We perched on the highest stair and swung
our sandaled feet through the gap, nibbling jelly sandwiches
with chopsticks and giggling at halabuji’s toupee.
Remember how pissed you were the year I went to rehab?
How after that, you looked at me with uncertainty,
like I was still your sister, but less?
You probably don’t remember the day that we buried you,
but man was it a shitshow.
Missionaries sang all five stanzas of Jesus Loves Me.
People kept asking me how you “did it.”
I held your friend’s Xanax so she wouldn’t take too much.
An addict holding pills for mourners. Hilarious, right?
All I wanted to do was make bad jokes, but you
were the only one who would have understood them.
What no one tells you about losing your sister,
about losing her to suicide, is that in one crushing hour,
your childhood becomes a moonless well.
You try to pull the bucket back up and remember the good times
but the good times feel just like the bad times.
Do you remember how hard it rained at your funeral?
How your friend Liz sang the Largo from Xerxes
after we’d lowered you into the ground?
On rainy days I still hear that song.
Are you still there in the basement where we skated
so fast that after a while, all we recognized
through the spinning was each other?
Do you remember your last breath?
Did you feel me take it with you?
If I lowered the bucket and sent down my lungs,
would you gasp with relief and tug on the line?

8 /

Seoul, 1988

Do you remember in 1988 when North Koreans
dug tunnels toward Seoul? We lived in that high rise
apartment with mom and our jittery chihuahua.
Under the bed, we forged a resistance.

Curious tourists can now ride a wobbly trolley
through those border-blind tunnels from the 80s.
Near the entrance they stand with one foot
on either side of the DMZ. They take selfies.

I read that Earth spins faster today than it used to.
Atoms pitch themselves across the hours and scientists
wonder if the receding glaciers are to blame.
What can be saved in a millisecond? What can be lost?

I want to step across the line, ride that subterrestrial train
back to that day with you when we imagined the worst
and decided to survive. I’ll slow the world down with my glacier
of grief for a glimpse of your face in a dim passageway.

We’ll stay as long as we can.

9 /

Survivor is Most Startled of All
After an AP article by the same name on 07/16/95 about the Sampoong Department Store collapse

Sampoong Department Store, Seoul, 1995.
Building collapsed due to faulty structure and negligence,
pressure to ride the economic high of the 80’s. 502 people perished.
The worst peacetime disaster in the nation’s history.
My aunt, the one who French-braided my hair every summer,
whose temper all the men in our family feared
the one who reminded me of a steel swan,
died that day while shopping for perfume and shoes.
Her body was never recovered.
People cannot survive 16 days without water
and yet someone did: Park, Sung-Hyon,
19-year-old sales clerk, was rescued after lying deep
in the rubble facedown. After warning the rescue worker
that she’d wiggled out of her clothes, she demanded he look away
from her naked body. She asked for her mother,
then wanted to know: what happened to the others?
My cousins and I later scattered throughout America:
California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut.
Mee-Kyung whose mother died at Sampoong
had lost her father to cancer the year before.
She reached out to me from L.A. in the days
after my sister took her own life, what happened?
she wanted to know. Sometimes I can still see
my aunt standing behind me, unusually tall
for a Korean woman, bent over the top of my head,
pulling my hair back tight against my scalp.
I wanted to answer Mee-Kyung but I also wanted to ask her:
does she ever wonder how we made it this far?
The article goes on to state of the miraculous survivor
who went on living unremarkably into the future:
of all those who were astonished by her survival
no one was more amazed than her.

SURVIVOR IS MOST STARTLED OF ALL - Deseret News

10 /

How We Fly

We are watching Iron Man again
and the portrait of my 할머니 hangs
on the wall where it has for years.
In it her hanbok is folded across her chest
like the wings of a paper crane.
I ask my daughter if she’d ever like to visit Korea.
She shrugs, looks at me strangely,
announces that she doesn’t feel Korean.
She has never eaten dried squid or kimchi,
has never walked the marketplace in 명동,
has never been to Jeju to see the brazen and glorious
pearl divers she was named after.
She has never bitten into a persimmon in November.
She can’t even swear in Korean.

Our dachshund stares at his reflection
in the fireplace door, wags his tail,
satisfied with the one who looks back at him.
On the screen Tony Stark builds his iron suit
from bomb parts, emerges from a cave
in a foreign land to obliterate the bad guys with only
his fearlessness and his flame-blasting gloves.
Why do you love this movie so much, I ask.
She looks at me as if there could only be one answer.
He tries to do his father’s work
but doesn’t let it hold him back.
He isn’t a superhero but he still flies.

Soon Tony Stark will announce who he really is.
My daughter will cheer, jump from the couch,
clap her hands the way she did as a toddler
in her crib when she saw me coming.
In the portrait, my 할머니’ is still young
but her brow is already furrowed,
her hair, pinned loosely into a nest.
What you don’t see in the photo
are the birds above her
scattering in all directions.

BLOODLINE
— Winner of the Washburn Prize, 2021 —

Copyright © 2021 Joan Kwon Glass
Cover art: Through the Crack a Flight Breaks by Jen Stein
Foreword by Laura Lee Washburn, contest judge.
Cover design by Diana Baltag
Book design and layout by Diana Baltag
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or republished without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Harbor Review
Joplin, MO 64870
harborreviewmagazine@gmail.com
www.harbor-review.com

If you enjoyed reading this micro chapbook, we would love for you to consider donating to Saejowi.
Saejowi is a nonprofit organization in South Korea that assists North Korean refugee resettlement by providing medical assistance, counseling, training, and employment services. Established in 1988, Saejowi operates strictly as a non-political and non-religious organization.

Joan Kwon Glass

Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest. Her chapbooks How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions) & If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press) are forthcoming in 2022. In 2021 she was a finalist for the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, the Subnivean Award, the Sundress Publications Chapbook Contest & the Lumiere Review Writing Contest. She serves as Poet Laureate for the city of Milford, CT, is a graduate of Smith College & serves as Poetry Co-Editor for West Trestle Review & poetry reader for Rogue Agent. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Diode, Rattle, The Hellbore, Pirene’s Fountain, Dialogist, South Florida Poetry Journal, Kissing Dynamite, trampset, Rust & Moth, Mom Egg, SWWIM, Honey Literary, Lantern Review, Barnstorm & others. Joan has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net. She tweets @joanpglass & you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.