Robert Perchan

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Peace Pipe Dreams

My sister had an imaginaryArtwork by Gene McCormick
friend named Bong Sing.
Bong Sing sported fairy
wings and waved a wand.
I boasted of an imaginary
pal I called Lefty. He wore
cleats and hefted a bat.
Wand and bat went at it
like two cats in a sack
till Dad got us our first tv
and tv gave us Walt Disney
Goofy, Mickey and Dopey
and Fantasia fed us LSD.

 

Welcome: An Advanced Elementary Cross-Cultural Guide To
Effective English Language Communication Intermediate Level

Please commit to memory the following dialogue:

Min-su: Hello. What is your name?
Miguel: Hello. My name is Miguel Esposito.
Min-su: What country are you from?  [Alt: What country do you come from?]
Miguel: I’m from the Philippines.  [Alt: I come from the Philippines.]
Min-su: Why did you come to Korea?
Miguel: I am looking for my biological father.
Min-su: And what is your favorite Korean food?
Miguel: My mother was his housekeeper and cook when he lived in Manila in 2000.
Min-su: And what is your favorite tourist attraction in Korea?
Miguel: She knew he had a wife and son back in Korea.  But he promised to support—
Min-su: Have you visited Kyung-ju, the historical capital of the Shilla Dynasty?   
Miguel: He sent her a hundred dollars a month the first few years after he left.  But then—
Min-su: In Kyung-ju you will find the tombs of some of Korea’s greatest kings.  You can view the golden crowns and ornamented scepters of these kings in the Kyung-ju National Museum.
Miguel: But then the letters stopped.  And the money stopped coming.
Min-su: Over a million tourists from as far away as Europe and South America visit Kyung-ju every year.
Miguel: My biological father’s name is Yum Bum-suk.  I believe he lives somewhere in this neighborhood.
Min-su: My biological father’s name is Yum Bum-suk?  I believe he lives somewhere in this neighborhood?
Miguel: Then you must be my half-brother!
Min-su: Then you must be my half-brother?  Welcome to Korea.

 

Robert Perchan’s latest books are the comic futuristic novella Tropic of Scorpio (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2022) and Last Notes from a Split Peninsula: Poems and Prose Poems (UnCollected Press, 2021).  His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000.  Bob continues to eat and drink and write in Busan, South Korea, under the bemused gaze of his translator wife, Mi-kyung Lee.