Sweetheart Cultivar
Hyejung Kook
Little litchi, elongated when young,
when ripe a heart-shaped
drupe, fleshy and indehiscent,
how you glisten when I slip
my thumbnail under stem-nub,
strip your thin, leathery, broken
and red-colored pericarp, how you cling
to your chicken tongue seed
when I worry you loose
with my mouth, glossal muscles
and transverse fibers contracting,
action potentials propagating down
the twelfth cranial nerve.
Hyejung Kook’s poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Hyphen Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and wildness, Other works include an essay in The Critical Flame and Flight, a chamber opera libretto. She is a Fulbright grantee and a Kundiman fellow.