WriteGirl Teen Jessica Kim Named 2021 LA Youth Poet Laureate

WriteGirl mentee Jessica Kim was named the 2021 LA Youth Poet Laureate on June 19, 2021.

Of the 18 finalists, 12 were WriteGirl mentees! Click here to view the performances.

Ghazal for K

By Jessica Kim

Jessica Kim is a Korean-American high school student, a WriteGirl mentee, a disability rights advocate and a poet. Jessica performed her poem “Ghazal for K” at the 2021 LA Youth Poet Laureate finals.

Late last summer, halmeoni visited California, bone-dried and thinned
like seaweed on the kitchen counter. She asks why I have not thinned,

fattened instead like a whale ready for slaughter, and blames the grease 
on miguk food. I want to tell her I am not American, hangul thinned 

into the back of my tongue and unreceptive to the stench of modernity. 
The only word I remember in Korean is sijang, hunger. Oceans thinned 

by extinction, a harbor split by upturned boats, famine kneeling in front
of our bruised mouths. Halmeoni says sijang also means market, thinned 

aisles of canned tuna and fake kimchi, the commodities of my past I want 
forgotten. What remains of my weekly allowance, I squander on thinned 

cityscape portraits and white pearl necklaces. Maybe this is why halmeoni 
mistakes me for an American girl, future Hollywood star. Foolish, thinned 

with dreams about dead origin stories. Yesterday, it was about a father aspiring 
to be a mayor, also sijang. Today, it turns into an elegy for my father, thinned

white hairs as trench lines in warfare. Halmeoni reminds me of the Korean 
wars I have not lived through, dynasties wrecked by bullets, history thinned 

inside the barrel of a rifle. The summer before my father’s death, halmeoni 
swapped his body with an aircraft, propelled it towards the Pacific-thinned 

waves, escaping westward. Midway, shipwrecks invaded his body, so I learned 
to spill his ashes into Californian seabeds before I had ever known the thinned

callouses of his hands. This summer, halmeoni moves back to Korea, says loss
is too foreign to her. Alone, I unlearn jeonjaeng, war, the memories thinning. 

Jessica Kim