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My eighty-year-old Korean mother bought a trailer
in a 55+ Florida trailer park. She has always seemed more
comfortable around white folks than other Koreans,
delights in their abundance of potato salad and poke cake,
appreciates that so many of their children did not
go to Yale or Harvard, is awed by and basks
in all of their shameless, American imperfections.
When she came home from a six-week stay and I asked
her So, how was it, her face lit up— Oh! I was the only Oriental,
so they just loved me! My mother, an adorable curiosity.
So small, so precious. Something to behold.
Unbeknownst to her, I too have a trailer park story.
When I was fourteen, I got wasted and then tripped
on acid for the first time. My friend Ondine and I
drove down to the trailers off Woodward, past
Six Mile Road, looking for pot. I was five the first time
someone I loved called me a chink. Twelve the first
time a grown man said he loved me then shoved his
tongue down my throat. Maybe that's why I am
always desperate to stray from whatever flock
I am told I belong to, wander instead
to those who see me but keep their distance,
those who do not care that I can only fly
backwards. I got my first tattoo that night
on someone's bed—a hummingbird on my right ankle—
a choice I was too drunk to remember making.
He held the tender bulb of my heel in his hand
like an offering while everyone else watched.
Hummingbirds don't migrate in flocks, choosing,
rather, to travel hundreds of miles on their own.
When they find each other, they are called a glittering,
a shimmer, a hover. My mother is home
and I meet her at the door so she can watch me
retreat, hum my wings so fast I can almost
hide behind my own heartbeat.
from the journal TAHOMA LITERARY REVIEW
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"Oriental” is a word my mother was taught to describe herself by American missionaries in Korea after the Korean War. Her strange choice to purchase a retirement home in an all-white, Florida trailer park is not unlike my tendency to retreat from her as I have navigated my own identity. At the trailer park, we are both spectacles–but also forging and fumbling our ways through to ourselves.
 
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Ishion Hutchinson Interviewed by Jesse Nathan

"I think that instinct is natural to my own writing, in that a sort of narrative suggestion is always a present overtone in the lyric form, so narrative—in terms of storytelling—is not what I am most interested in or striving for in a poem. I want, for the poem to be effective, harmonics, a pattern in which words are interacting with each other and crystalized into an irreducible and memorable event, which goes beyond the experience of the poem being a finished thing."

via MCSWEENEY'S
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eli Payne Mandel on Reading Prose

"As a poet and therefore complicit in the making of poems, I have tried to weasel out of this problem—the problem of poems in and against the world—by writing prose poems and poems about prose. Conventionally, the world is prosaic. It unfolds in ribbons of tweets and advertisements. Also: graffiti somewhere in the northern Italy. If my poems attended to and participate in this prose, perhaps they would tell me, or you, something about the crisis we call the present."
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