I read my poems in public for the first time

By Claire Jean Kim

Not at a college or library but at a dive bar

called The Love Song in downtown LA,

nerves going all day, I only half-see, driving in,

the tents on the sidewalk, one after the other,

dingy and torn in dusk’s grim light, and I think

of what other things are lined up this way,

those plastic basinets in a newborn unit,

cubbyholes in second grade, hallway lockers

in high school, bunk beds in Army barracks,

cots in a shelter, those drawers in a morgue,

the ones they pull all the way out, graves

in a cemetery, and The Love Song pulses,

strobe lights sweeping the walls with dots

of green, incense wafting with a chaser

of weed, a young white woman from Iowa

sitting next to me says she wrote a story

about BDSM, sent it to her dad, is waiting

to hear back, and as I walk to my car,

I remember the dog, a German Shepherd,

lying in the threshold of one of the tents,

front legs outstretched, keeping vigil.

About the Author

Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, and The Missouri Review.