Another Door to the Moon
Every time I see something cooland point it out to someoneit sneaks behind a building,shrinks itself, camera-shySo I will capture it here—the perfect crescent of the firstclipped nail stained orangefrom peeling tangerineswhile we watched TV again,held each other again, having notgone outside we wonderwhat the moon looks like todaybut don't bother peeking out the blindsbecause it's always the sameInstead I tell you about a childhood songabout the night sky—how my face is round and biglike the moon but the only Korean wordI can remember is the word for egg,for daughter, 달걀 and 딸,when the word is so simpleI forgot about it entirely and insteadthink door, which is 문, which yes,sounds like moon, and I finally whisperto you 달, and there it is, there's the 달.
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- February 25, 2024
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“Another Door to the Moon” from THE SYMMETRY OF FISH by Su Cho, copyright © 2022 by Su Cho.
Used by Poetry Daily with permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Su Cho is a poet and essayist born in South Korea and raised in Indiana. She has an MFA in poetry from Indiana University and a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has served as the editor in chief of Indiana Review and Cream City Review, and has served as guest editor for Poetry magazine. Her work has been featured in Poetry, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and Orion Magazine; the 2021 Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies; and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a recipient of a National Society of Arts and Letters award, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is currently an assistant professor at Clemson University.
“Su Cho’s debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish, is a moving and convincing meditation on longing, and yearning, and reaching. Longing across language and generation and tradition and family and bodies, these poems reach and reach toward who they love—or who they wish they could love more. When she writes, ‘All we did was open ourselves / like peonies reaching for the light,’ I think not only what a stunning line in a book made of stunning lines inside of stunning poems, but I think, yes, that’s what the best poems, these poems, are: they are like peonies, reaching for the light.”
—Ross Gay
“Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish casts such corpuscles of light to the Korean and Korean American imagination. Cho’s poems invoke the tongue’s memory to give language to the unnamable: 가시, 밤, 쌀, 살, 사랑니, 봉숭아. Lightness and stillness expand with each word—and from every malady emerges a cure.”
—E. J. Koh
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