STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
MONICA KIM
University of Michigan
After Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Allen Ginsberg, for the windows are plastered
with perfectly photoshopped men and women holding bottles of soju;
I have come to consume the images of consumers telling me to consume—
is this the capitalist America you warned us about?
But what nostalgia! Getting lost in the produce section with cases full of Korean melons wrapped in mesh white styrofoam, the cold cranked to teeth-chattering temperatures, the
names in hangul and English, the lonely ajummas pushing their red carts along, the jars of kimchi lining the fridges’ shelves.
I don’t know if I would see you here, Allen Ginsberg, among the black-haired and almond-eyed perusing the freezer of frozen fish.
What would you say of the pre-packaged processed foodstuffs—the myriad of ramen and their multicolored wrappers coordinated with spice level?
(yellow—mild. red—hot. black—death.)
A supermarket in California becomes an H-Mart in Koreatown; and where on the road are you, Ginsberg? Are you hand-in-hand with Cassidy in Chinatown?
The fluorescent lights are bright behind me as I leave the H-Mart, the full moon aglow in the starless sky. Do you howl at the moon?
(I think I lost Howl in aisle seven with the thirty-pound bags of rice.)
Do you hear the silent howl of the woman crying in aisle four, forgetting which brand of dried seaweed she had now that her mother cannot tell her on the other side of the Styx?
Do you hear the silent howl of the man who finds half of home in the pre-cooked noodles of aisle ten, now that his father cannot knead the flour in the Underworld?
Are you America? Do you welcome the Orpheus who ventures one last backward glance at Eurydice, their homeland, do you welcome the separated stranger who, distant from the shoreline, is lost at sea?
Monica Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to New Jersey with her parents when she was two and a half years old. The first story she remembers writing is a fantasy tale about a girl and a boy on a dragon, when she was in the third grade. She can't say that was the beginning of her passion for writing, but she has loved it ever since. She is a recent graduate from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in Honors English. She has an upcoming chapbook publication for her series of poems titled “An abridged medical family history & multiverse of selves” as well as publication of a poem titled “Korean School” in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
