Assistant Editor Haley Crigger: I first fell in love with the images of “Apricots”: a paintbrush coated in pollen; a drowned orchard; the lover’s scales and gills. With a single pathway forged between “just two clumps of trees,” Yunkyo Moon-Kim offers a more versatile, more radical understanding of intertwined destinies, of love as a call to action. There are many wonderful poems about the interdependence of Life and Love. What makes “Apricots” so outstanding is its proof, its revelation that even in the “absence of future”—of bees, of children, of our very lungs—even posthumously, love remains the essential demand.
To hear Yunkyo read their poem, click here:
Apricots
At night, I find you pollinating trees by hand
with your artist’s brush, transferring pollen
from blossom to blossom. In the absence
of bumble and masons, it becomes necessary
to propagate ourselves. In the absence of future,
we may as well not live at all. Though I love you—
it’s what makes me live. It is what
our lack of children envisioned for us. You brought
the pollen from the anther to the pistil,
posthumously, after the orchard sank underwater.
With your brush, you coated the bulb
and waited ceaselessly and dissolvingly
in the dream floodplain. In the meantime,
your lungs turned to gills. You waded back and forth,
like this, every cycle, over a hundred meters of toil
between just two clumps of trees. Just the same,
I walked the distance between your hand
and your heart. Water folding over our heads,
the space between aftermaths, stillwater, pollinator,
full bloom. Sunlight diffused through the surface
onto your covering of scales. The underwarmth.
The liquid movement in your hands. It made me live.
Yunkyo Moon-KIm is a Korean lesbian poet. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Porkbelly Press, Tyger Quarterly, and elsewhere.
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