Jessica Kim

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.