“Customs” by Debra Kang Dean

Friday from the Archives: “Customs” and “Heart Sutra #6” two poems by Debra Kang Dean with art by Olivia Gatewood in NCLR 2000

We invite all NC writers hailing from the incredibly diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander lineages to submit work to any and all of our call for submissions! Our Applewhite Poetry Prize Contest submission has been extended through May 14th.

Debra Kang Dean, of Korean and Okinawan decent by way of Hawaii, taught in ECU English during the early 1990s. Her poems are in two recent anthologies: The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison, 2020) and They Rise Like a Wave: Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak, 2020). She is the author of five collections of poetry: Totem: America (Tiger Bark, 2018) and the prize-winning chapbook Fugitive Blues (Moon City Press, 2014), as well as Precipitates (2003), News of Home (1998), and Back to Back (1997), and in collaboration with Russ Kesler, she wrote Mourning’s Spell (FLP, 2013).*

Customs

Barely out of Greenville, North
Carolina, three cars plug along
ahead of you on the two-lane
no-passing-zone stretch of farm road,
and you, white knuckled, behind again,
casting ahead to your destination
two-and-a-half hours away. The truth is
they are doing fifty-five
in a fifty-five zone. So you turn
on the radio to “chill”
as your son likes to tell you,
which slowly turns you all inside.
So you don’t take note of how
one by one the cars ahead of you begin
pulling off the road. Instead,
in front of you, you see a clear lane
and a line of cars, headlights on,
proceeding past you. It’s like this
when you glance the customs of a place
you will always be new to;
even after eight years, there’s
some surprise to knock you out
of cruise control. You find yourself
in the middle of it, whatever it is,
embarrassed by your own uncouth.
Funeral. Somebody taking up
permanent residence. It registers
after you’ve accelerated past
the first pulled-over car and
the second one, where you manage finally
to yield. It’s why, up North
in your new apartment a year later,
Elizabeth, a friend’s daughter not yet two
who’s spent two weeks on the road
in a rented car will touch you: when she turns
away from you to point to nowhere
in particular that you can gather
and says to her mother, “Home, home,”
you will feel what she means.

Read “Heart Sutra #6” on Gale Literature and add the 2000 issue to your collection today!