Joan Kwon Glass

one poem

Six Reasons Why I Have Considered Exile

  1. We often return to the place of pain just because it is what we know.

  2. I am an atheist who prays for faith.

  3. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer, my grandmother took my uncle to a witch doctor despite her devotion to Jesus.

  4. Every year I have at least one student who would rather be mocked than ignored.

  5. I dream of my grown children as younger versions of themselves and when I wake, it feels like they’ve died.

  6. I’d rather be lost outside of a black hole than be trapped inside of one. [1]


[1] Stephen Hawking explains how to (sort-of) escape a black hole — Quartz (qz.com)

 

Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions, 2022). She serves as Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, as a Brooklyn Poets Mentor, is a proud Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. Her work has won or been finalist for several prizes & her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. Joan’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writers Workshop (The Margins), RHINO, Rattle, The Rupture, Dialogist, Hayden’s Ferry Review & elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her family.