JOAN KWON GLASS
CW – suicide (“Agnostic as a Young Girl“)
Agnostic as a Young Girl
poetry finalist in our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
Every Sunday evening a small group of us
came back to church for more.
Our parents in a lamplit room downstairs
took Bible study while we, the children
of God’s most devout, gathered
in the fellowship hall to watch videos
on the Tribulation and Rapture,
to learn that eventually we would run out
of chances, that even God had his limits.
It was the year of my first kiss
behind the stairs when the pastor’s meek,
orange-haired son was kind enough
not to turn away from me.
I didn’t know it would also be the year
that my father would leave us
that I would spend a decade in active addiction
or that at 37 my sister would take her life.
One night I asked the youth pastor
to rewind the tape back to the moment
when a non-believer wakes
to his entire family disappeared:
their clothing and shoes in heaps on the ground.
Not ghosts, just gone.
For a full minute I examined this young actor’s face
frozen on the screen, rooting for him
like my life depended on it,
saying over and over
I believe, I believe.
True Grit
“Lookin’ back is a bad habit.”
Rooster Cogburn, True Grit
At dinner tonight we make polite conversation
as lobster shells the color of a feverish child’s cheeks,
lie broken and scattered across the table.
My mother tells us what she’s been watching on t.v. these days:
westerns mainly. John Wayne is her favorite.
It’s the innocent violence, she says.
I like not having to figure out who the good guy is.
Once I killed a garter snake with my bare hands,
curious how far it would stretch before breaking.
When it finally did, I watched as its torn body
writhed and flailed in the sun, stunned to be alive.
At five years old I could sense my father’s disdain.
His brooding filled our home like a potent incense.
I already knew we would never be enough.
I already hated my mother for not seeing who he was.
Listen, heroic or broken: either way
we ride into the sunset, right?
I’ve stopped trying to transform the aging sheriff
with a bad eye into my savior.
I’ve stopped punishing the people I love
for loving me back.
Over dessert I ask my mother
which John Wayne movie is her favorite.
She says: the one where
he saves the girl from herself.
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 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 & you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.