Scenes From a Naturalist’s Sketchbook


By Tiffany Midge

My father tells me the stars don’t exist,
having burned out year’s ago. These are what remains,
tricks of the eye.  We are standing beneath
a congress of firs lit by stars—
flickering candles in night’s windows.
After my mother dies he tells me
everything still exists, it’s all still alive.
I think of the intrepid current of a Cascades’
creek that nearly drowned me—
the rapids I was saved from banked by stones
each with a name my father knew: Terrigenous,
breccias, shale.
  In the Gulf of Mexico
kerchiefed women, aunties of Jorges and Jose,
peddled giant sea turtle shells to tourists—
my father shrugging them off: Gracious, gracious, no, no.
I think of remote camps, my father leaving
for hours on expedition, returning with a hat
full of berries he swore he’d outrun a bear for.
Nanooch Tropical Gardens, Thailand: My father
chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes beneath
an umbrella of palms, the esplanade full of howler
monkeys and sun bears, an exhibit of giant butterflies.
Everything still exists, it’s all still alive
.
We net smelt at a Pacific coast beach,
our fingers stained purple from gutting fish,
our faces stinging with salt spray, canvas Keds
drying on a line; tacky residue of campfire
fish on our hands, the meat part smoke, part sweet.
Whatcom Creek

It’s been four years since I’ve seen my father
and here we are taking in the mayhem
like a couple of tourists who’ll later
buy bright, glossy postcards of the salmon
belly-up and gutted along the pier.
He’s still handsome, my father, still smokes
the filter-less cigarettes, year by year
their tar flowering like badly-timed jokes
in his dark lungs.  I used to pray for him
before prayer was futile as these fish
pitching their fruiting bodies into dim
bleary tombs.  This same time next year I’ll wish
for more time.  I’ll wish for redemption,
but only ghosts will rise, I imagine. 

First published at Drunken Boat No. 15 
Readmore  http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/tiffany-midge 
Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.
Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award.  She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review and the online journal No Tell Motel.  An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho, she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College.

Dances With Halmoni

By Dr. Sook Wilkinson, Ph.D.

As a young girl growing up in South Korea, the only people I saw dancing were halmonis-- the grandmas. In my era, young women from “proper” families were told not to smoke, drink, dance, talk too much, or be loud. Modesty in everything was the norm, and humility was considered a virtue. 

Unless you majored in dance, like my sister did, you wouldn’t move your body in front of other people, especially in public. I secretly envied the halmonis. They seemed to have all the freedom and fun that was forbidden to me. 

I couldn’t wait to become old enough to be a halmoni. And now age has given me what I’ve always longed for. 

GG is my special name for my granddaughter, my wiggle dance partner. When she hears music, she hunkers down on all fours and wiggles up and down using every part of her body. Thanks to GG, I’m learning the secrets of dance. 

Recently as I watched her do her usual wiggle dance, I sat down and analyzed the movements. What I discovered is that both Gangnam Style horse dance and GG’s wiggle dance have something in common – lots of hip movement.  I was never taught to dance growing up in Korea, which makes the popularity of the Korean rapper Psy’s Gangnam Style in the US a surprise to me. Too shy to try these dance moves in front of others, I tried them in my own living room. I found it to be a great exercise, because when I moved my hips, my whole body moved just like GG’s. 

Today I can picture myself along with the halmonis in Korea doing Gangnam Style horse dance at picnics, laughing and talking loudly, and drinking Soju, the rice wine.

GG became the ultimate "trump card" in my life even before she was born. This tiny granddaughter who has become an addition to our family has motivated me to change my priorities in life and resulted in my daughter and I becoming closer. Although GG lives more than 2,000 miles away in San Francisco (while I'm in Michigan), but thanks to technology like video chats and Face Time, I “see” her frequently.  Even so, my arms itch to hold her wiggly body and dance with her.

When our two children, TJ and Gina, were born, my mother traveled several times all the way from South Korea to stay for months to help raise them. She was the best Halmoni, with a capital “H” that my kids could have had.  They knew that she loved them no matter what and that they couldn’t do anything wrong (ever!) in her eyes. Even though there was a language barrier, the bonding they developed with their Halmoni is unbreakable. It’s the kind of bonding that comes from deep trust and lots of shared experiences, the kind that instills a sense of unconditional acceptance and security in a child. 

I’d been waiting for a long time to become a halmoni just like my mother. With the announcement of GG’s upcoming birth, I knew instantly that I needed to retire from my work as a psychologist. To make myself available to my daughter and my grandchild, I knew I needed to re-prioritize my life and make room for them. 

GG was only one month old when her first Christmas came around. My daughter and son in law sent me a tiny envelope as their Christmas gift, and we put it under our tree. On Christmas Day, as I opened their gift, tears welled up in my eyes. Inside of the envelope was a note that read “All I want for Christmas is a visit from Halmoni!” 

Now that GG is older we have had wonderful experiences together: strolling along Lake Michigan in Chicago; traveling to Spain, and building a sand castle on the beach in Cancun. I’m the happiest when I’m GG’s nanny Halmoni.  And it makes it even better when my husband can join us as GG’s “manny.”

There comes a time in life when things, no matter how precious, beautiful, and expensive, don't mean much. What matters most are experiences with family and friends that enhance the quality of my life. Centering my thoughts on GG keeps me grounded. Visualizing her big smile at seeing my face appear from peek-a-boo, her cry of relief when rescued from the top of a stairway, her spontaneous wiggling whenever she hears music, her concentration and proud look taking her first couple steps are moments that wash away all the ills of the world. Finally, I am able to focus on the simple things in life, and feel content all over.

Copyright © Dr. Sook Wilkinson, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Sook Wilkinson, Ph.D. has enjoyed a wonderful life in America.  As a native of South Korea, she came to the US at age 22 with $100 in her pocket. Since then, she has become a renowned clinical psychologist, author, and a respected community leader while raising a son and a daughter with her husband, Todd.  Michigan has shaped her life profoundly and she is committed to giving back to her community and state.

As a passionate advocate for active participation in her communities, she gladly accepted the opportunity to serve as the Chairperson of the Michigan Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission, appointed by Governor Granholm. Through her leadership, the Asian Pacific American community is gaining much-deserved recognition and visibility. 

Professionally, Wilkinson holds the highest level of license to practice psychology in the State of Michigan and has been in clinical practice for over 30 years. A leading expert in the field of international adoption, she authored Birth is More than Once: The Inner World of Adopted Korean Children and co-edited After the Morning Calm: Reflections of Korean Adoptees . She also authored the script to the documentary, We the People, about the history of Asian Americans. Her leadership extends to the Upper Peninsular serving on the Board of Trustees of Northern Michigan University in Marquette, appointed by Governor Granholm.  

Korean 1st Birthday


By Betsy Schaffer

a baby girl dressed in
traditional hanbok

cheered on by family
to pick from items
that seal her destiny

money for wealth
thread for long life
pencil for academia
rice for food and shelter

looking around she
grabs the only thing
she wants

her mother’s hand
as it moves away


double-take
there’s something
about the thickness
of the nape of
his neck
and the way
his neck holds
his head

that reminds me
of my little brother

found alone
tongue wedged
in his throat

tears
the tears of adoptees
fill the Han River

tears of disbelief
at being seen as
ungrateful for
wanting to know
our own birthright

tears of anger
at being seen as
less important
than the privacy of
faceless birthparents

tears of sadness
at being seen as
pitiful aliens
by the country
that exported us

the Han River
will never run dry


Copyright © Betsy Schaffer. All rights reserved.

Betsy Schaffer works with numbers, reads, writes, and ponders her life’s purpose. She was born in Seoul, Korea and her given birthday is January 1967. She arrived to her adopted parents in January 1970. Her poetry is published in More Voices: A Collection of Works from Asian Adoptees, Yeong and Yeong Books. 






Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems

by Robert Bensen

Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival                                    


We set three paper plates in the grass
between the picnic tents and ravine at the wood's edge.
I broke our daughter's fried bread, murmuring thanks.
Steam uncoiled, brushed my hand
and branched along some shifty breeze.
A handful of Mohawk kids scooped polliwogs
in cups from the concession, their family's current stand.
They flocked around a lean, sweat-beaded young man,
who drew a hoop of writhing snake from the reeds,
a red blossom where he'd sliced the head off. 
"You know this snake?" he called across the ravine. 
"Can't say I do," I said.  "But why risk it with them?" 

Past the woods we couldn't see a lumbering freight
shake the trees and hoot some vestige of its victory. 
Our girl asked to touch the snake.  I carried her over.
She smoothed its patches of tweedy, irridescent black. 
"She's more brave than you," the boy in a Barney shirt
needled his brother.  "You were right," I said again,
"not to take a chance.  Not with them." 
But he, astonished at the drive in that headless spine,
roped it over his arm again and again.

The kids packed behind him when he crossed the knoll
to find the museum's naturalist.  He scanned the faces
of milling visitors suddenly hushed at this apparition
from some world where men strode bare-chested out of the wood
wearing snakes on their arms.  He'd hoped the white man
with the curious girl had known something final.

Well, back in the sluice, a deathmask stared
down narrow, trackless halls of reeds, 
while in the tents a woman beaded lightning down my sleeve.
And now, through apple leaves, as dawn pales blue
the hood of the moon's last milky eye,
I'm after sliding an arm around my sleeping girl,
who's of another mind:  she squiggles down,
feet perched on my wrist, poised to chase or be chased
around the circle we make.  Soon must come her dream
of another life she has to run through one more time.

What Lightning Spoke                                          

            1

The island that could have claimed my life refrained,
returned it with a mouthful of dirt and a shirtful of wind.
Later a Rastaman shook his locks at me and my plate of curried goat,
shouting, "One day you will be shot!"  Though I said I thought not,
I caught my breath and leapt from one frame of this life to another. 

Once the Channahon swept me in a hole below a dam. 
I drank the river dry.  Now the river flows inside.

Makoce sica, land that gives back nothing, wanted my bones
to scatter in its red clay, flecked with saurians and Sioux.
I echoed down its caverns till my arms fledged, and I flew.

The Colorado wind that spills down the spine of the continent
tried to kite me into the gutted Glory Hole, but I bent
and took root at the rim, and let the teeth of the wind
comb snakes from the snarls in my hair.

Water, earth, air:  their tendered deaths
caught in me like tinder—beneath this flesh is fire. 


            2

Begin again in silence. 
Out of nowhere, lightning and what lightning spoke;
spike and decay.  Echo.
It curtained the road, a tree of light hung from the root.

The boy I was, was walking with his sack of newsprint blurring in the rain.
The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming,
its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea:
in plain air, power makes infinite ways.

I bolted after its afterimage.  I swarmed through its fading cage.
No one home would mind a feverish child's tale,
so I retold it, next blue day, to a lone white feather of a cloud
that bloomed and boiled its furious head over the rooftops.

Maybe it was something I'd said, maybe just weather.
But sure some eminence had graved itself in my eyes' twin caves,
had scorched there the smoking claw of a thundergod.
I close my eyes and sketch, against the curtain of blood,

that first light, its descent, its flickering net of tongues.
At the time, there's only a lightening, a lift
like waking at last, already vaulting toward the zig-zag stars.
And ever after, for the record, its volleys echo

in the ear’s taut drum, down the stunned alleys of the head,
its signature chars the flesh of cloven oaks,
its shaft, drawn through the bow that arcs the valley,
will pierce the heart’s racing chambers it will pace. 

Copyright © Robert Bensen. All rights reserved.

"What Lightning Spoke" was first published in Pivot Magazine, and Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival was first published in Tamaqua.


Hartwick College Professor of English Robert Bensen has released a new collection of poems titled Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems, in collaboration with Professor of Art Phil Young, whose artwork is featured on the cover. 

The poems in Orenoque, Wetumka, occupy the borderlands between Euro-America and Native America, between now and then, between the seen and unseen. "The space between millennia was thin as water" in the reflection of the mangrove swamp in the opening poem, "Isis at Caroni." The poem invites the reader to get lost in the swamp: "the Indian guide Nanan lost us/with every turn of his wrist down every channel" that leads to the breath-taking, timeless world of the scarlet ibis. The poems negotiate the mazes of natural and human history to reveal the hidden and unknown, as in "What Lightning Spoke:"  "The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming, / its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways." "Orenoque" is set in the labyrinthine Orinoco River of Venezuela during the rapacious 16th-Century explorations for El Dorado, and the late 1990s exploring for remnants of that ancient world. "Wetumka" weaves an ancient Zuni migration story with that of a Cherokee artist recovering his family scattered along and long after the Trail of Tears.


Bensen's poems have been collected in five books and published in journals from the U.S., U.K., West Indies, and Asia, as well as in African-American and Native American journals.  His work has earned a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award.  He has written numerous essays on Caribbean and Native American literature, and edited several anthologies of those literatures, most recently Children of the Dragonfly (U. of Arizona Press). His poetry has been shown in eight exhibitions with photographs by Charles Bremer, in galleries that include the Bright Hill Literary Center and the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY.  He taught writing and literature and directed the writing programs at Hartwick College.  www.robertbensen.com

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