Mother-of-Pearl

What I know of absence
I learned from these shells—

how the body, once gone,
leaves behind its most honest architecture.

Mother-of-pearl throat
singing without breath,

each curve a year
the ocean counted in salt.

See how the empty becomes
more precious than the filled?

The soft flesh we swallowed
in one slick gulp, forgotten,

while the house it built
gleams like captured moonlight

on a white plate, eternal
as the ache in my chest

when I think of you
three thousand miles away,

your laughter an echo
in the shell of my ear.

Jeong - this untranslatable sorrow that makes beauty of
what's left behind.

The oyster's last gift:
teaching us how to treasure

the shape of what we've lost,
how absence can be

more luminous
than presence ever was.

In Korean, we say han - the deep wound

that becomes its own
strange comfort.

Here, in my palm:
even emptiness
can hold light.