My poems and five haiku appear in this Weekly Avocet.
Thank you, Charles, Vivian, and Valerie, for choosing my poems.

–Byung A.

The Orchids
Jose Santos Chocano

Freaks of bright crystal, airy beauties fair,
Whose enigmatic forms amaze the eye--
Crowns fit to deck Apolo's brows on high,
Adornment for halls of splendor rare!
They spring from knots in tree trunks, rising there
In sweet gradation; winding wondrously,
They twist their serpent stems and far and high
Hang overhead, like wingless bird in air.

Lonely, like pensive heads, all featherless,
Loft and free they bloom; by no dull chain
Their flowers to any tyrant root are bound;
Because they too, at war with pittiness,
Desire to live, like souls that know no stain,
Without one touch of contact with the ground. 

"The Orchid" appears in Isaac Goldberg's Studies in Spanish-
American Literature (Buentello's Publishers 1920.)
Jose Santos Chocano, born on May 14, 1875 in Lima was 
Peruvian poet.  
 

Ode to the Kimchi

Don't spice up our food, they say;
what kind of people eat the cabbage 
looks like that? says a girl, wincing. 
But many Americans and others 
                                  love kimchi.
don't eat, if you don't like it;
no one force you to eat it.

With garlic, ginger, cayenne pepper
in it, kimchi is antioxidant.
If you don't like spicy red kimchi, 
then you have a choice--white kimchi.
yes, white kimchi. even kimchi has 
red and white. To make white kimchi,

use green pepper and pear for you and me. 

©Byung A. Fallgren 

Snow Gove of Denver
The Cyborg Jillian Weise

Where disabled activists lived and loved
and fucked and fought and fucked again
after fighting and made all the public buses

across the nation crossable and were 
arrested and were arrested again
this time for asking the question 

"May we speak to Senator Gardener?"
and were jailed for three days and three nights
and we stayed for three days and three nights

and I was so in love with your brain
and we scissored and ate popsicles at dawn
and I lodged in the hotel bc you had work to do
important work, more important than--
dawn, I have not forgiven you..


The Cyborg Jillian Weise is the author of multiple titles,
recently A Kim Deal Party (Borg 4 Bork Productions, 2020)
The recipient of awards and fellowships from Pen America,
among others. She lives in Florida.

Wail
Johnson Cheu
    for the young who ask, "How did you learn 
                                            to like yourself?"

There are glaciers, imposing , yet shrinking.
There is the iris, violet sky cradling shares of sun.
The white Bengal tiger, snow and black inky.
Infinite reasons I could give for gladness,

though some may salve the wound from which
your question arises, how to be glad to be alive?
Stitch your hearts fissure: recall family, friends,
a slap, cigarette burn, the rod something searched

down, or welled up in your darkened pupil.
Turn outward: two A. M. streets, creeps in cars,
the chaos of human folly delivered by calm,
coiffed news anchors. The wound is within you

and not. The answer within you and not.
Want, comfort, desire, love ought not be wounds.
We pine for them from our first wail,
what you must give and take, till no voice is left.

Johnson Cheu is a poet and assistant professor in the
department of writing, rhetoric, and American culture 
at Michigan State University. 

Sharing

sharing is beautiful thing
do not confuse it with robbing
lazy bum's poor excuse

--Byung A. Fallgren