Kimchi
by Franny Choi
My parents’ love for each other
was pickled in the brine of 1980,
spent two decades fermenting
in an air-tight promise.
Their occasional salt caught
a slow fever, began to taste like
a buried secret. They choked
in each other’s vinegar, dug for pockets
of fresh-cut love, once green and whole,
now a shrunken head, floating.
Every night, she pulls it, messy and
barehanded, out of the jar, slices it
into slivers, and we all swallow,
smiling through the acrid burden
kicking in our throats.
From FLOATING, BRILLIANT, GONE by Franny Choi. Write Bloody Publishing, 2014.
Most Poetry will post a poem by a poet of color, selected by our members, each day through the month of July.