Published in Issue 62.4: Fall 2023
Fall 2023 | Noah Arhm Choi Reads "The Korean Spa After Top Surgery" – MQR Sound
There is only one place on earth
where a frieze of mermaids stand silently
as women in black bras and underwear scrub
the body in front of them. This poem
will not change the uniform they must wear
or the male and female only lockers or the x
on my license or that this is the one place
I want to wear pink like my mother is calling just to say
hello. I want to bathe in the geranium pool promising
to leach toxins from my skin like an eye is never
a mirror. I want to be called exemplary or favorite or most
welcome guest, and never the first, or the only or the one
who is so brave. Some dude I haven’t talked to since half
a lifetime ago writes to say he is SO PROUD, as if
I need him to mark me as special and inspiration, as if I yearn
to open my mouth wide so he can tap
my teeth and say how unique I am to know my teeth
are teeth and not a doorknob or a sign that says this dude here
is woke. How simple it is to wish once
a year on a cake. How simple it is to sink into hot water,
to eat potbingsoo swimming in the condensed milk the war brought
and never took back. When my therapist says back
when you were cis and before you were male like she knows
what she’s talking about, I think of how an oat milk latte costs
7.99, two dollars more to avoid what my stomach can’t
keep, and somehow it is still true I want to be loved
by the permed emos and food court queens as if these huge
pink shirts were all the Korean words I understand but cannot
say right, as if I can breathe underwater, sink
to the bottom like a coin
with no eyes to ask if I am real
if I breathe
if I move.
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. A Lambda Literary Writer in Schools, they received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and their work has appeared in Apogee, The Rumpus, Split This Rock,and elsewhere. Noah was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022, shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize, and received the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.