On Their First Date

By DIANA KEREN LEE

My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.

Connect the dots between each falling flake.
My brothers and I were born, making five of us—
a star, a line that returns to where it began.

The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach,
through her hopes and dreams, a hole.
She belly-laughs when he pops through the open roof
of the bus that won’t hold his whole frame.

Crumbs of snow we hold onto to keep the path clear,
subtitles accumulating as they embrace.

 

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

 

Diana Keren Lee is a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship winner and a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Wildness, and elsewhere, and she has received support from MacDowell and Yaddo. Born and raised in Austin, she lives in Colorado.

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On Their First Date

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