Brenda Kwon

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Cartilage on bone, fishhead meat.
Leftover rice scraped from pot and paddle.
Cucumber ends, extra carrot.
Turkey neck, the broken mandoo. 
Mango seeds, bruised mush peaches.
What’s too small and not worth saving.
What won’t fit in the packed container.
The silence that follows in an empty kitchen.

That’s what little girls become.

 Math 

I don’t know where Mom keeps the stamps.
They are hidden away.
Like his short-term memory.
He doesn’t know where to start looking.
I don’t know how many to give him.
One means she’ll be back soon.
Ten means it’ll be much longer.
Ten also means she’s not coming back.
I’ll buy you more, I tell him.
He says this bill needs to be paid.
There are penalties that come with forgetting.

Sleight of Hand

I let her think I’m magic.
I don’t tell her
how running the hairspray nozzle
under warm water unsticks the pump.
Instead, I smooth the grey of her hair,
tuck it behind her ears,
while she wonders at me like
I’ve raised the dead.

I don’t know what it is
to have a child look at me 
like I know all the secrets of the world.
What I do know is the sleek of my mother’s hair 
and the bottle of hairspray peeking out of the trash,
shiny, heavy, confused,
nowhere near ready to be thrown out—
and how an easy fix
makes it good again.

Brenda Kwon is a writer, professor, and yoga teacher born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai`i. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at Korea University in 2005, and her creative and critical work have been published nationally and internationally. Her collection, The Sum of Breathing, won her the 2015 Hawai`i Literary Arts Council Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and she currently teaches in the University of Hawai`i System.