diapause

i wanted to be the kind of twelve year old that ran away, but instead i am the kind that squats in a rental home scrubbing scu marks of the wall with a rag that used to be a blue Cisco t-shirt. my mother

is making omusoba and talking to Lee Jung-jae, she doesn’t know how the smell of anchovies and kimchi sits on you in a school cafeteria, the way foreignness slumps in a pile on the kitchen floor, chewed and spit out. i am

drinking Bacchus-D and yakult instead of CapriSun, i am

buying noodles in bags and saving jars for pickling, i am swatting bugs o the door while my mother wears her childhood like an apron.

brown marmorated stink bugs don’t have the ability to bite people nor can they sting. they have very few predators, conveniently, no one wants to eat them: there’s no one to run from, there’s no one to bite.

stink bugs are an “invasive species.” this is

because they are native to asia and were introduced accidentally. in this way, we are the same. here is this 2,600 square foot american home, both of us

don’t belong here. i wanted to be the kind of child

that eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks a glass of milk, but instead i’m learning how to wash rice and making badly sealed dumplings.

i walk around the ESL in me as if it is an ugly-folded bulge

of dirty-washings, the trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal chemical compounds released from pores in the abdomen. stink bugs

communicate using vibrations. i, through the trimmed fingernails of my grief. i am a younger version of my mother

muscling a knife through the thick end of the carrot, 넘사벽.

once upon a time we painted the kitchen table eggshell blue but now it has faded dully into grey.

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