First published in Korean in Hwanghae Review, vol. 121
Anne Carson had an older brother, and Anne Shirley was an orphan and

Anne Brontë was the youngest of three sisters and

Ann Vickery was an only daughter.
What about Anne Hathaway and Anne Conway?

I don’t know. They were someone’s wives

and then they tried extremely hard to become someone else

or vice versa.
That morning, the break up didn’t find Anne Carson.

In her mind, Anne Shirley is chatting happily.

‘Today is like a duck made of strawberry cream. I feel sweet.’
They say Confucius’s Discussion of Poetry came out of a large tomb in China.

A bamboo book about poetry.

Ann, does poetry always emerge from a grave where something has been lost?

From the tomb of love, the tomb of fire, the tomb of time?
With red hair instead of a red hat,

like an orphan girl instead of a boy sent under a green roof,

I was delivered to my house by mistake, an eldest daughter instead of an eldest son.
After that, two more girls were misdelivered—Emily and Anne! Welcome!

Would my mother have been less unhappy if I had been a boy?

If I had brothers, this conditional clause would not be possible,

because I wouldn’t have been born.
If the fourth child, born when I was nine, had been a girl,

would my mother have been abandoned?

Wandering between the third and fourth children

what about the two baby girls gone missing?
Ultimately, was my first poem born

in the shiny stainless steel waste bins underneath operating tables?

On all those daughters’ graves?

My mom never looked sad
but her sadness comes to me by accident

and poems are written like daughters.

I don’t miss my mother. I only miss her sadness.

Everyone misses their mom, but I guess I’m a bad bitch — just like mom said.
I always hid behind my red hat like a tired boy

going around, stealing other people’s faces.

Walking back and forth across the bridge

between my mother and grandmother,

trying to

cross the past.
Anne’s hand tugs at my hat brim.

Yarn unravels bit by bit.

My face reddens and tangles.
Someday I’ll go to the park of different faces.

Like a beautiful thread between the trees and the sky

looking differently every time.
When I was young

I prayed to the women who didn’t want me, to my cruel goddesses.

Combining into one, Please love me.
The sacred marriage of my right and left hand.

Now, they’re split up.

The right hand. The left hand.
Each went to find its lover.

The right hand going to move the blind sun to its proper area, and

the left hand following Pluto exiled.
A younger sister and an orphan.

Either the only child or the third child,

or the stars of Anne, alone and still someone’s wife.
Between the fingers of the grave robber digging the dark sky of the park

stars slip and shine

like knives cutting through a black satin skirt.