Zoo

By Cathy Park Hong

Ga The fishy consonant,

Na The monkey vowel.

Da The immigrant’s tongue

as shrill or guttural.

Overture of my voice like the flash of bats.

The hyena babble and apish libretto.

Piscine skin, unblinking eyes.

Sideshow invites foreigner with the animal hide.

Alveolar tt, sibilant ss, and glottal hh

shi: poem

kkatchi: magpie

ayi: child

Words with an atavistic tail. History’s thorax considerably

cracked. The Hottentot click called undeveloped.

Mother and Father obsessed with hygiene:

as if to rid themselves of their old third world smell.

Labial bs and palatal ts:

La the word

Ma speaks

Ba without you

I dreamed a Korean verse, a past conversation

with Mother when they said I was blathering unintelligibly

in my sleep.

The mute girl with the baboon’s face unlearned

her vowels and cycled across a rugged phonetic map.

Sa glossary

Ah din

Ja impossible word

Macaws turned into camouflaged moths.

The sky was overcast, the ocean a slate gray

along the wolf-hued sand. I dived into the ocean

swam across channels to islands without flags;

replaced the jingoist’s linotype with my yellowing

canines and shrilled against the anemic angel who

cradled the bells that dictated time and lucid breath.

Cathy Park Hong, “Zoo” from Translating Mo’um. Copyright © 2002 by Cathy Park Hong. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.

Source: Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002)

Biography

Cathy Park Hong’s first collection, Translating Mo'um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second book, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and will be published by W.W. Norton in 2007. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her writing on politics and her reviews have . . .

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