The first time I swore was on the swings in Pusan, maybe
I was six. I remember because my mother caught me
as I sliced the air singing fuck and shit and asshole, my feet
pumping harder than my heart. But I can’t remember how
I learned to cuss, as my classmates enunciated it.
Children of missionaries, those blond Baptists from the Bible Belt
never swore, and were as likely instructors as my parents
who never did. Where did you learn these dirty words?
My mother asked, her face plum with the blood
I would bleed if I cut myself. But that never happened,
skin broken, or my uncle, another afternoon, from within a galaxy
of moving boxes, motioning to me with a curl of his finger
for a kiss. I might have answered my mother,
I was trying to speak Korean. Without context, the word fuck
was as incomprehensible as that French-kiss. But I must have known
I was saying something bad, why else sing those words so loud
they resonated like a memory in the cavern between buildings,
drawing mother to me from where she was from me.
But then, neither of us examined the vulgarity
for the dirt of the thing: why in Korea I began to swear,
or if it was in my uncle, I had first seen the dark look of pleasure.