“An “Oriental” Jane Doe” and Other Poems

By Joey S. Kim

An “Oriental” Jane Doe

reads Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
police description

anonymity

diluted into female

“Oriental,” one of plenty,
“The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh.”

a bruise depressed into the skin
of a
news clipping parrots
unvarnished 
death

rape and homicide reveal themselves

“Open paragraph”

charges
first-degree rape and second-degree murder

a story of eyes 
ions repelled now

“Make swarm.” 

“You remain apart from the congregation” 

“And it begins.” 

Forgetting.

Hong SungChul - Perceptual Mirror-II (2003), mixed media
Image description: A sculpture made of several monitor screens that form a spherical shape. An East Asian woman with short hair is displayed across all the screens with the front three main screens each showing a fragment of this same woman’s face. 

Assimilation or

isolation. 

“One might die of dehydration next to a well.”

Dictum for a habit gone useless.

Phantom of her nomenclature 

stenciled in a birth record burned by the “Empire.”

Follow the lines to complete a drawing of the peony, 

draw minhwa to pretend our art matters

more than the tattoo on his left arm 

that says “mother love” in Korean instead of 

whatever.

Hong SungChul - String Hand (2011), print on elastic strings in a steel frame
Image description: Two portraits, one in the foreground and one in the background, are both made up of several strands of string. The string portrait in the foreground features an image of several hands grasping at each other. The string portrait in the background shows a close-up of the back of a person in a long-sleeve, red shirt. The person is pulling at a long strand of large, white beads behind their back. 

Occupied

“As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to be cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam. Rather, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it.”—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“the fact that it amazes me” is replaced

occupied by a new nose,
shaved chin, double eyelid

our bodies made fractals by Dr. David Ralph Millard’s “Oriental Peregrinations” 
the army forces protecting us from ourselves 
so we remain “soft power” not

the Korean body enraged lest 

the peninsula now fetal 

as if

neocolony means a nation from where my father refuses to return

to wear a shirt made of
mulberry silk I enter the forest.

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Joey S. Kim (she/her) is a scholar, creative writer, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toledo. Her first book of poems, Body Facts, was released by Diode Editions in 2021. A literary critic as well as a poet, she researches global Anglophone literature with a focus on 18th- and 19th-century poetics and aesthetics. Her forthcoming book, Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation (Edinburgh UP) highlights the racial and ethnic formation of the poetic subject in terms of histories of Orientalism.

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Hong Sungchul completed an M.F.A and B.F.A in sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul before finishing another M.F.A in Integrated Media at California Institute of the Arts in the US. Since graduating he has exhibited many times in the Far East, the USA and Europe and his work features in several international collections.

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