Category: Writing
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 4
Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim I took the boys to the park. Two men waved me over—I think they’re both deaf and homeless. One man wanted to know what happened to Pablo’s legs. I told him it was bandaged to protect the pressure wounds. He didn’t understand, so I lied and said, “His joints gets stiff.” …
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 3
Pretty boy Liko. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim Pablo is aging before my eyes. He seems to sprout new fatty tumors on a daily basis; there are two that are growing like deer antlers above his ears. I was scratching his chest the other day and felt another plump, round bump. Assuming it was another tumor, I bent over…
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FOBby Barbie
Photo courtesy Sandra Gabriel via Unsplash My parents often dressed me in a too-short cherry-printed dress I had outgrown. Photos of our family at Niagara Falls and there I am in the cherry dress hanging just below my waist exposing my yellow terry cloth underwear. I wore them or was clothed in them so often it…
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Eating Envy
Photo courtesy xandreasw via Unsplash I read a book titled Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents. It described the fear a child feels when they see their parents’ behavior become erratic and aggressive; it addressed their coping behavior to control their parents. As children, they impaled themselves on the sword of self-loathing when they couldn’t extract…
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 2
Pablo “m’ama, non m’ama, m’ama” (she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me). Watercolor and pen. By Ayoung Kim Pablo, our monk-artist-deep-soul golden retriever, loved dancing with drag queens. At the time, I had been living in a three-story flat in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco with my sister and two friends.…
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Dog is God Spelled Backwards, part 1
Pablo, our gentle giant. Photo courtesy: Ayoung Kim This is a collection of stories I sent to family members in the year before our beloved golden retriever Pablo’s passing. I never intended to publicize any of these. However, Pablo’s light shouldn’t be kept within the confines of our family. These stories bear witness to the…
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This is What Love Looks Like
This morning uh-muh-ni came padding into the kitchen complaining of heaviness. My whole body feels heavy, I don’t know why this happens. She stretched onto tip-toes for a box of cereal from the top shelf. It’s been there for over a year. Fumbling with it she noted, Oh, I never opened this. Scrambling out the…
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Morning Appointment
Photo courtesy: Karolina Kolodziejczak via Unsplash The other morning, we had to go to UCLA medical center for uh-muh-ni’s check-up. With an early morning departure time, uh-muh-ni had woken only fifteen minutes beforehand. She was scampering around in the kitchen in staccato movements: fixing her coffee, packing fried man-doo, and grabbing a bag of tangerines…
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Coughing Flower
Part 1 She sits a folded flower in her chair, coughing into her iPad. Pulling a tissue, she spits floral spittle into it, tosses it to the ground, wadded and soiled. Her stigma is swollen. It’s constantly dripping. She declares her diagnosis: “I have too much nose.” Coughing Flower swipes her iPad and wipes her…
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Tenderloin of Taiwan
This photo of the bathroom omitted from this Airbnb’s property…I wonder why. Just as I reached the gate to the apartment building, I saw an old man with his penis out pissing on the bushes in front. I wasn’t in the Tenderloin in San Francisco but in a suburban neighborhood in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It wasn’t…