Claire Jean Kim (Southern California, USA)
It’s you. I know your scent.
It came to me in dreams after you left.
The smell of moss after rain.
I tried to find it again. In your bed.
In your boots by the door. On the paths
we wandered by the shore.
The house rejoiced at war’s end.
Year after year we waited for you
to appear. A man gone this long does not
want to come home. I lost my passion
for the hunt. What is the killing for,
I asked. Every stag outran me after that.
At dawn, your son picks wildflowers
for the bowl on his mother’s loom.
Then runs along the cliffs in the spray
of the sea. Twenty years I have loved
this dark-haired boy. I move my tail
to speak my feelings, one of which is joy.
Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and animal/climate justice. She is the author of two award-winning books published by Yale University Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively, and she has just completed a third book (Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World) that is forthcoming from the latter in June 2023. She began writing poetry in December 2021, and she has taken workshops with Kate Angus, Kim Addonizio (twice), Bernard Ferguson, and Derek Sheffield. Her poems have been published in Rising Phoenix Review and Terrain.org.
