An Orphan Receives Her Commercial DNA Test Results from Two Companies: An Abecedarian
By Sun Yung Shin
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
Ancestry laid upon a curse, a jinx Blood, and another thing molten—reveries of my face, the façade behind my face Called to account the countries, deviations of echolocations: Dead—mine—dark-detained Ever banked in an ethnographic afterlife. Fell—deep sleep postponing my rewrite, rotate, mutate; Genes to be circumnavigated by spit-polished explorers. How is a child’s globe a work of colonial conditioning? In this condition, the wet hex in miniature Jumps from gene sequence to succession. Pattern recognition: Kinship, failing upriver—descent— Life maps itself in vials sent via the real Mail, archaic method homesick for the gold horses of its origins. Never miscalculate genealogical disruption’s (in)ability; Orphan your ancestors in the underworld; above—who tends graves, Pours the prayer of soju when the dead need music. Shall this be our final Quarry, silent as a doe and daughter, Reading the light, sewing a shade; a haunting Sold to a centrifuge, the sterile shine of its exposed aperture—now Travel to the Neander Tal; witness the heavy-brow-boned branch fork and break. Our dead Underestimate us, time machines drifting at the rate of future’s arrival, Venn diagrams of past and speculation Where will we repose. Collected. Finger- and jawbone; dusted dictionary Xenomorph, alien self, foreign You, incarnate in the disciplined nation of the contemporaneous; stranger Zealous for the sweet peace of the unborn, as yet unburied.
Sun Yung Shin is a Korean-born poet, writer, collaborative artist, and body-worker. She/they lives in Minneapolis.
Used by permission from The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Sun Yun Shin.
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