The Sound of Sugar: LEONA SEVICK

HAPA

Taking my order by phone, she asks me

What do you look like? So I can find you?

Except that’s not how she says it. Dropping

words the way my Korean mother does,

still making herself understood, she waits

while I decide. Pausing, as I do, as

I have done since the first time someone asked

me with genuine interest what are you?

I answer this woman in a way I

know already she will never accept,

take the chance I never take. Yes, she says,

I think I know you. Spotting her just as

she comes through the door, I wait for her to

scan the room, find me and then decide. She

approaches, tosses bags on the table,

mouths the word I know she’s thinking, the word

I’ve heard a dozen times. Hapa. It is

the one my mother hates, the reason why

I was grown before she took me home to

meet her people. I see her stiff face, black

eyes of resentment at their turned backs, their

conditional love. Now I speak the truth

of who I am, or at least half of who

I am. This woman receives from me a

wide smile. I thank her, watch her go knowing

half a truth is better than any lie.

ABOUT THE POET

Leona Sevick is a professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where

she teaches Asian American literature (she is an Asian American poet). Sevick was

named a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and

serves on the advisory board of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center.

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