Yellow croaker could have swayed outside storefronts
on a taut rope. It could be my birth mother gifted me the doll.
The scent of instinct on my pulse—her chosen rhythm

could have been a soft sound made with her palm.
As though a sea trade, the Korean baby doll
wrapped in yellow around her chest

traveled with me from Seoul, yellow jacket and pants.
Wherever we began together—the black soybean
and sweetened pumpkin, rooftops and curved eaves came back—

the vanishing point unclear. The doll became soiled. The faulty
water heater nearly ruined her and altered my flower shoes,
which also came with me. A shoemaker could have sewed

with red silk and a boar’s-hair-needle.
 

—Bo Hee Moon

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