Issue 5 • Spring 2003 • Poetry

Hardtack

Frances Kim-Russell

If Sappho could be anybody, she decides,
she would be a cowgirl. Hard saddle leather
between her legs, reins loosely gripped
in her left hand. She would wear a Stetson.
Or, for kicks, a ten-gallon chapeau.
She doesn't tell anyone that she doesn't
really care for olives, or even flatbread,
soft and hot still from the ovens.
She imagines jerky, squints her eyes
and works her jaw. The terse
fragments dropping from her mouth
like stale crumbled biscuit.

Frances Kim-Russell is a Master's student in East Asian Studies at Stanford University, though lately she has been working more on her poetry than on her thesis. Her work has appeared in The Red Wheelbarrow, and she also has work forthcoming in ONTHEBUS, and in the anthology Invasian: Asian Sisters Represent.

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