Issue 4.3
Fall 2024
Reflection
"Sometime after the Bear Became a Woman" works with the Korean founding myth that a bear became a woman and had offspring with a god. Without directly pushing the myth into the reader's face, I wanted to create a space that invites the reader into looking up more and having enough to think that the poem may be a long metaphor.
Sometime after the Bear
Became a Woman
The hospital staff wrote
Mandarin instead of Korean
for the language the patient speaks, a machine
beeps for attention, for a new pack
of potassium. A blue haired nurse lulls
it back to sleep. A decade shy
of one hundred lies here, two
daughters exhausted, one tries to reclaim
the tongue not written on the white board.
Crying loudly in the distance: a chorus
of black bears echo from Jirisan ask
if the extra sixty-five years were worth giving
birth to a god. Water trickles from a green
sponge and with lips looking as if they were being ripped
apart you reject it, looking to return to the forest,
looking to hibernate one last time.
Hannah Lee is a NYC based Korean-American poet who processes her world through poetry. She is the 2023 winner of The Birdhouse Prize. She is a graduate from the Queens College MFA program, and was an editor at Armstrong Literary. Her work has been featured in Encounters Magazine and she has a chapbook forthcoming in the spring.
Hannah's Book Recommendation
​
A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok
When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen