Man in Korean Costume
about 1617 | chalk on white paper
Black strokes enrobe his bodyand document a gaze. This is my face
orange in drugstore foundation, my white mother'sspring palette. I follow texture
in Peter Paul Rubens' sketch of Choson textiles.A merchant vessel's outline
moors in an invisible shore. This is my bodycleaved but still a map
of surfaces becoming a woman.Blood quickens. Brown mounds
ancestral script on my chest. The Flemishmaster shades the right ear and pillows
the lips, as if seedlingsfester; the figure demurs but gives in
to a connoisseur. Which details provehe's Korean when liquid blue liner
slants my eyes into a mask?Again Rubens paints him awestruck
obscuring a Moor's profile, witness toSt. Xavier's power to resurrect
two white men and a woman anguished.Her infant remains veined marble, an idea [End Page 86]
the white mother's immortality is infertile.She teaches me broad, upward strokes jaw to ear
prevent wrinkles. If I ask how the crimsonrobe tears away from my womb each month,
she sorts her brass vanity's cargo.Apprentices clear studio tables for clothes
the Jesuits removed from four Korean boysenslaved, specimens for an altar
mural to entice the pope to canonizethe order's founder. When my white mother
curls my coarse hair with a Marcel iron and teasesmy bangs into black meringue
she is a maker of miracles. In Antwerpstill life is the artist's signature. [End Page 87]
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion (2007), recipient of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award; Interrogation Room (White Pine Press 2018), mentioned in The New York Times and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry; Song of a Mirror (Fo Books, Bulgarian edition, forthcoming 2020); and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Verlag, German/English edition, 2019). A poetry editor at AGNI, she teaches creative writing and directs Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College.
