by Tiana Nobile

Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polaroid, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what’s the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. I’ve spent my whole
life in orbit of other people’s light, celestial satellite
in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn
from a stranger’s surname? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the very first time.

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Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Recently named one of The Gambit’s “40 Under 40,” her poetry debut, CLEAVE, was released by Hub City Press in 2021. She is a finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, and her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives in Bulbancha, aka New Orleans, Louisiana.

by Tiana Nobile

my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?
you say,

dazed under the haze of hospital lights,
your arm tethered to an intravenous drip

charging like a box to numbing light.
You’re twenty-five, adrift in anesthetic fog

floating through the white sea of hospital hallways,
and you think of me, the living package

that changed your life. On the day of my arrival,
you were a month away from turning four.

While the buzz of anticipation swirled
around the airport terminal, your small body

perched high, anchored in the crook of our father’s arm.
So this is how babies are born,

you thought, and everything was yellow.
Scuffed linoleum tile. Blur of fluorescent lights

hovering above you. How you must have imagined
my body rattling in the box during transport

as our mother scurried
to the airport bathroom to snap my joints

into place. Today, we laugh about what you said.
We laugh until we forget why we’re laughing.

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Tiana Nobile is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a poetry fellowship from Kundiman. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Georgia Review, among others. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.