"She is the sign/isn't she?"

"The Moth in Your Kitchen," a poem by Jiwon Choi

Jiwon Choi said she was walking in Brooklyn’s storied Green-Wood Cemetery when the poem was “conjured in my head.”

One of the vanguard cemeteries of the 19th century “rural cemetery” movement, Green-Wood is a place of beauty and tranquility in the heart of Brooklyn busyness. It is an urban greenspace, a sanctuary for flora and fauna alike, and the “eternal resting place” of more than 600,000 people, among them everyone from Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Leonard Bernstein.

And Choi’s mother, whose ashes are interred there. She died on Mothers’ Day in 2020, at the height of the devastating early COVID wave that gripped New York City. Already stricken with dementia, she contracted COVID and spent her final days in a hospital her daughter could not visit.

Choi has grappled with that loss in her poetry ever since.

“A lot of the work I’ve been creating goes into the work of grief,” she said. “I go to Green-Wood Cemetery a lot, and that’s where the poem started in my head.”

The poem is “The Moth in Your Kitchen,” a quiet meditation for the most part on the need we have to understand the death of someone in our life while still “embracing the mystery.”

Choi, the author of two poetry collections to date from the literary press powerhouse Hanging Loose Press and a third one due out next year from Spuyten Duyvil, traces her interest in poetry to an elementary school teacher who started her writing when she was in the sixth grade.

From there, “my development was to write off and on over the years. My first book came out in 2017; my second book, in 2021.” she said. “I don’t have an MFA. I think of myself as a slush pile poet.”

She said one challenging aspect of writing “The Moth in Your Kitchen,” was creating distance between herself and her emotionally charged subject matter.

“It’s a factual poem, but there was a distance I needed,” she said.

At least in part, that distance derives from what, to me, is a strikingly effective and intriguing sort of implied conversation between the speaker and the “you” she addresses in the poem, both of whom can be understood to be the poet herself.

Too, her characteristic comfort with paradox and irony (her most recent book and her website are both titled I Used to Be Korean, and she wonders in “The Moth in Your Kitchen” whether “the mosquito you just smacked . . . was really your mother.”) may play a role in that distancing. A lifetime of straddling two cultures—her Korean parents brought her to the U.S. in 1972, when she was just two years old—has given her “always a sense of trying to undo a knot,” she said.

“Everything feels like an amalgam,” she added, perhaps a useful perspective for a poet.

None of that is to say, however, that “The Moth in Your Kitchen” came about entirely through Choi’s customary process of careful revision, or that the speaker-you construct didn’t occur naturally.

“My writing process is to be clear,” she said, with clarity typically achieved through revision. “[But] because this was a poem that came to me as I was walking, it didn’t feel nebulous as poems can feel,” and it arrived largely intact.

Together, the speaker and the “you” look for “signs” that can give meaning, or something like it, to the unknowable, as people do, “But you don’t feel anything/you who believe in signs/who looks for signs/who dreams in signs,” Choi writes in “The Moth in Your Kitchen.”

“Thinking that these [symbols] can be clues is just part of the human condition,” she said. “If you look hard, you’ll always find something.”

Choi said that the quirky little menagerie that appears in the poem—the moth, the mosquito, the blue heron—is also a reflection of a new perspective she has gained in losing her mother.

“I’ve become more aware of the things that people kill, and the contradiction in that, an understanding of all the death that we contribute to, knowingly and unknowingly,” she said.

Here is the poem.

The Moth in Your Kitchen 

Could be your mother
come back to see you
your mother who died
last year in the hospital 
where you asked the doctor to send
you a picture of her
and he did send
a picture you can not show anyone
for the horror of it
like in the Werner Herzog movie
when he warns the lady not to 
listen to
the recording of the Grizzly Man
and his girlfriend being eaten alive 
by a bear  

but what if the mosquito you just smacked 
against your leg at the cemetery
in between looking and listening for birds
by the dell was really 
your mother

some god’s bad joke 
about karma?

but really she must have been the blue heron 
suddenly seen
up to her knees and bill 
in the water 
stabbing at fish

so in your head the conversation goes 
“Pardon me, by chance are you
the reincarnation of my mother, a tall Korean woman
who married a short dentist?”
But you don’t feel anything
you who believe in signs
who looks for signs
who dreams in signs.

She is the sign
isn’t she?

--Jiwon Choi

Jiwon Choi is a poet, preschool teacher, and urban gardener. She is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons and I Used to Be Korean both published by Hanging Loose Press. Choi’s third poetry collection, A Temporary Dwelling, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2024.  She started her community garden’s first poetry reading series, Poets Read in the Garden, to support local writers. You can find out more about her at iusedtobekorean.com.