by Jong Yun Won
For four months I walk the streets of Incheon
desperate for egg roll
and sour kimchi-jjigae.
So stricken by diaspora without a recipe
I land in YouTube, watch a fifty second clip
of a white woman teach me culture.
How wretched.
You roll the egg onto itself
which makes a cloud-like texture
as long as you know how heat works.
You slice the yellow caterpillar into pieces
take one in your mouth nestled next to soup
and you chew. Was it not ten years ago
my mom would bring gae-lan-mari on every hike
and not offer, but shove pieces into the faces of ongoers
they’d obey, and think: wow, unseasoned egg, not:
wow, cold luscious egg with rice, on top of a mountain
spinning me round like low clouds and pine in the valley.
I wish I would have learned from an ajjumma
smacking my clumsy hands with a wooden spoon
but they also tell me to find my recipes on Tik-Tok
emphasizing practicality over my joy.
All the Beauty of the Universe
by Kathy Bruce
Jong Yun Won (he/him) is a Korean-Canadian currently teaching English in Korea. He studied creative writing and English at the University of British Columbia and is a recipient of the BC Arts Council Scholarship. His poems have been published in Peregrine, Stoneboat Literary Journal and Waccamaw Journal. In the summer he is mostly a tree planter and/or sleeping.
Kathy Bruce is a visual artist based in Upstate New York and Scotland. Her work explores archetypal female and mythological forms within the context of poetry, literature and the natural environment. Ms. Bruce is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant, 2 Fulbright-Hayes scholar grants to Peru, and a Ford Foundation Grant. She has exhibited her work in the UK, US, and internationally, including Senegal, Taiwan, Denmark, Peru, France, and Canada. She is a regular contributor to various literary journals, some of which include Three Rooms Press, The Vassar Review, Alchemy Literary Magazine, Open Minds Quarterly Journal, The Perch Yale University School of Medicine, The New Southern Fugitives, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Variant Literature, Landlocked Literary Magazine, The Rejoiner Rutgers University, The Brooklyn Review, Twyckenham Notes, The Porter House Review, Pushing Out the Boat, National Women’s History Museum, and Minding Nature.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 