Life lessons
i.
do not ever ask for an instrument
on your seventh birthday
like the year you got an acoustic guitar and every
day you had to drag it across its bridge and up
into the attic to pluck its strings
in the grotesque shadows of moonbeams
but even the dust bunnies mushroomed
on its maplewood skin
before you could strum a chord.
ii.
do not ever try to find your x
in the flickering eyes
of the imaginary black cat
that stares back at you only during witch hour
and there’s still thirteen unsolved problems
in the real world that you can only tangent across
so you don’t belong in our subsets
of our friend(x) and you have everything
but a solution.
iii.
do not build sandcastles on cloudy days
when you clump the sand on your palms
that start to age with the blemishes
of all the trips to the grocery store
and balancing plastic bags full of instant coffee
but even the tides cannot enclave you
from its kinetic memories
stored in houses of glass bottles
so you have to bottle up
your own messages.
iv.
do not forget your mother’s homemade dishes
that dripped of saccharine courage
in the steamy crooks of her kitchen
where she hides pockets of spices
shaped with the ages of her love
and now you live by yourself
but the smell of her mooncakes still
palpitate on your empty stove
and pulls you back home.
v.
do.
Jessica Kim is a writer based in California with works appearing or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Semicolon Lit, and more. Her poems have recently been recognized by the National Poetry Quarterly and Pulitzer Center. She loves all things historical and sour.