Jessica Kim is a Korean-American poet based in California. Her works have been recognized by the National Poetry Quarterly and Pulitzer Center, and can be found in Eunoia Review, Clover & White, Minute Mag, Perhappened, and many more. She loves all things historical and sour.

Also by Jessica Kim: k(NO)w preservation Paper Town

Poets Resist
Edited by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
July 30, 2020

Jessica Kim

Poem in which I talk about my disability

for Constance Merritt I understand why you talk about ghosts in every poem. No, I am not yet apprentice ghost & they do not uncover the entrance hall into this body. Tonight, I steal into the party dressed as Asian & disabled. Someone asks where’s your costume but there is no oration for blindness. How I can imagine skin scaffolded on a different body, eyes as mercury in orbit. How even in this one, I am unseen. Though someone is always looking for ways to tell me blind woman is less than anything. You tell me premeditation does not matter when taking & I start to question my upbringing: righteousness as sin, forgiveness as erasure, compliance as woman. I will leave this party unnoticed & smuggle into some house, eyeglass in hand. Remind me again I do not have eyes, impaled by ghostness in perpetuation. Here, let me fist maledictions into locked doors on sleepless nights. Blind girl mistaking braille as stars.


Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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