Chocolate World, Jump Into The Dream

Dear beautiful reader,

If you read last month's poetry, you know that most of June was spent in necessary recovery. But the good news? I am feeling (and healing!) a lot better this month. Wahoo! I hope you are, as well.

A lot of my poetry comes from a psychic place of trauma and past wounds—no surprise there, lols—but this month, I wanted a little distance from all that, as that can become a bit emotionally taxing even as a writer, and instead, tried to intentionally transport both myself and you, the reader, somewhere else.

So, we travel back in time to the summer of 2003, and then, in a more non-linear fashion, into my life as the daughter of Korean immigrants. You'll understand the strange title only then.

I hope you enjoy.

With gratitude,
Amy

Summer 2003

Lawn mowers buzzing in the 85 degree heat,
hot dog legs propped against the wall,
with a strained neck looking at the Sony TV
on my brother’s blue-gray pilling sheets,
as he points his gun at a security camera
I’ve tried to play once, but when I missed a target
and the alarm bells went off,
I screamed, dropped my controller,
ran out of his bedroom
“It’s just a video game!”
He shouted down the hall—
six years my senior.

I only come back when he agrees to play 
Tony Hawk Pro Skater with the cheat code,
giant skaters or teeny tiny ones,
going up and down the half-pipe
Now, this— this I can get down with! 
Bopping our black bean heads,
Green Day sings
on his all-silver four-CD stereo:
 “Sometimes I give myself the creeps!”

School has been out at least a month, Appah says
he’ll bring McDonald’s or Burger King
for lunch and then it’s time for CPE.
Kevin drags his feet because he finds it lame
playing water-basketball
with teens who aren’t his friends
and his overly enthusiastic, t-shirt-tanned dad
I, on the other hand, blowing bubbles
and spinning underwater, twirl
into a mermaid at the indoor city pool

Janice calls on the landline—
a number only best friends store by heart
She asks me if I wanna play outside.
Yes, in fact, we can use the new chalk
my mom bought me from Wal-Mart!
We draw until we sweat, until our hands are
powdered white underneath the scorching sun.
We wonder why the clouds are shaped so
differently, and how ladybugs could 
be so spotted. And maybe tomorrow, 

we should bike to the mall.

It’s summer 2003.

Hwaiting! 화이팅

It is stitched into the paper towels I wash and
air-dry and re-use, or perhaps 
in the way our native language got lost at sea,
when parents crossed the Pacific Ocean,

L’s and the R’s falling out of the cargo hold

for my aunt once chuckled at my 8-year-old self,
“you say McDonald’s just like your mom.”
Huh, McDonner’s? What about McDonner’s?

Eventually, I would learn to snake my voice
drain so American pipes could deliver its water
safely into my first-generation veins

It is in my hands, a cotton balloon shirt
scavenged from the eight-storied DongDaeMun,
that shouts in black Impact font—
“Chocolate World, Jump Into The Dream.”

Seared into the laughter of those who recoiled
at my garlicky, seasoned bulgogi at cracked
red and orange lunch tables half-past noon. 

But reclaimed in Umma’s 2026 hearty laugh
in the family group chat, as I send
a photo of some steamed asparagus and pasta
and say: “White people lunch today!”

Recorded on the scantron
my first and only C+ in AP Biology—
Oh, how suddenly the pencil in my hand
became a wooden stake through the heart.
On the pedestal of acceptance letters of
Harvard
Stanford
Berkeley
UCLA—
shiny leather monogrammed 
monuments
parents wear on their forearms

Forgotten in the birds and
bees talk I never received
and how, for all they know,
their 32-year-old daughter has still
never even touched an elbow

Cursed in the way I was hit 
more if I cried more— “dduk!” 
strength measured by how

muted 

your screams could be

The mending as they help me move into 
a fifth apartment on short notice,
pack a delicious doshirak for our break

Hidden in the figures of my adult salary, 
as every Sunday, they still dare to traverse 
the lands of the American kingdom of bulk,
expeditiously call and say,

Amy-ah,

need anything from Costco?

Its own kind of membership—
as I will never decline some free toilet paper 
and a bag of frozen cod, please

Traced in the blood as
my father’s mother abandoned him twice:
once after the Korean War with an American soldier
and again, after she stopped responding 
to our letters years ago.

It is in the shatter of no matter 
how many broken plates,
and which doors need to 
be reconstructed—

I still want to remodel their house.