She’s endangering the safety of others, they say,
when she hits the front desk with her cane,
and I say, you can’t be serious, tell me to my face
my ninety-pound, ninety year-old mother is
a threat to anyone, at which point they start
reciting protocol, like bots, I can move her
to another place, they say, but that place will
drug her, too, which is when the ball drops,
they hire too few staff, give drugs to cover the gaps,
why does everything on this accursèd
earth come down to monetary worth, just don’t
make her into a zombie, I plead, but they do,
then send her to a clinic to fix the issue, where
they drug her so much she can’t even chew,
I try to prop her up in the passenger seat
on the way back, but she tips over, slides down,
head lolling, mouth slack, and when I ask,
some time later, where she is, is she in the
refrigerator, the woman on the phone drops
her voice to a more sympathetic register,
she’s in our temperature-controlled room,
and I smile at the mortuary-speak, picturing
the corpses copping comical poses the moment
the door closes, wondering if they leave
the lights on overnight, because all her life she was
afraid of the dark, which is how she got stuck
with my dad in the first place, when they ask about
the clothes, the ones I saw her in that morning,
the striped pink yoga pants and light blue
sweatshirt I got because they were cozy
and cheery, I say leave them on, since it seems
an indignity to strip them off, though why I am
still thinking about dignity at this point, I cannot say,
that ship having sailed around the world by now,
that horse having left the barn and galloped
across the Mongolian steppes by now, and when
I look at the website the next day, I follow
the rule of threes: some in a biodegradable
papier-mâché turtle, to be taken out by boat
and released, because she loved the sea, some
in a metallic urn, for me to keep, a teaspoon
in a blown glass orb for her grandson,
for her, forever, the one —
Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. Her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, The Indianapolis Review, ONE ART, Radar, Diode, Poetry Online, and The Missouri Review, among other places. TriQuarterlynominated her poem “queen of mycenae” for a Pushcart Prize in 2025. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fulbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poetsanthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.