By Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, ETA ’14-’17 Cake we grilled our own meat at restaurant 108 and drank beers and soju, sitting Korean-style. we spent too much time teaching our language to learn the language of this new country. we leaned on each other to pick from the few words sown inside our mouths. we were just kids wondering how to eat. 어떻게?. we planted a new alphabet to help us sprout through the soil of Sejong, in our new little neighborhood. with soft-spoken syllables, our courage boils up: 맞아요? back at home, we said “fork” and “spoon” or “please” and “thank you” now we only point and say “여기요, 이거 더 주세요” our tongues burn, digging for more words when we see a kitchen. we set the cake down next to our grill. here we sing 생일 축하합니다 instead of happy birthday. the song tastes like an expiration date another birthday I wish I could be home for, hoping after a year it will still be waiting for me in the fridge.   Microaggressions I don’t like rice. It’s the core of what my mom and dad love. They eat it plainly, sometimes with their hands. It’s the food of their homeland. I wish I knew how to use my hands the way they do. When we go out for dinner, we eat with forks and knives. They leave behind traditional ways for dinner time. I’m not who my parents were at 23. They flew away from a familiar life to make a better one for me. I flew away to forget about New Jersey. In this second home I’ve come to know, I am asked why I am a teacher. Why I didn’t become a nurse. Why I’d rather write poems. Why my hometown isn’t Metro Manila or Cebu City, two places that didn’t raise me. I go to church to pray but instead get distracted. I hear people say, “America isn’t your real home.” In the winter, I flew away from Korea to feel less like a question and more like an answer. To be something definite, that ends. Yet a tourist shop cashier says, “you must be one of my people” and a hostel owner speaks in English to everyone else but never to me. In countries so foreign, I’m seen as familiar. Wherever I go, there are always assumptions to erode. It never fails to come: “So really, where are you from?” Upon Arrival The morning I landed in NYC I just wanted to curl up and crawl into a huge black bowl and burn. From one home to another in 14 hours. I am mixed up inside over what I didn’t say goodbye to enough times. I suggest Korean food for lunch. I miss being so good- mannered: tilting my bowl to have the last of my hot soup, using two hands to pass the com- munal kimchi dish and keeping my chopsticks out of the hardened rice I tried not to eat. I wish I could drink myself out of this bowl while I’m still scalding hot so I don’t feel me on the way down. I miss my tongue. How swollen it got from a soup burn. Re: Last night I dreamt of a poem I wrote to you on a plane a year ago Last January in Gangnam, at Oz board game cafe, we built train lines by playing Ticket to Ride until the owner said you’ve been playing the wrong way Before you my weekends were perfect successions of Americanos You said I had always wanted to travel I said I never wanted to leave America You asked me why do you work so hard I said I don’t know, I’m in love with being tired After you I bought fewer groceries we traded poems over dinner You wrote of every favor, I ask but one don’t forget me while you’re gone I wrote though I’m miles away I’m not really gone you’ll see me every day, in each rising sun Twelve months later I moved across America Upon landing I hit send I wonder what you’re doing now You replied steady and smooth I miss you. Guro Station, Line 1 In another dream, I’m bundled up in the warmth of fish-shaped bread. A treat in the winter. The smoke from a chestnut stand beckons me back to my apartment. I choose the subway instead. The ten-minute walk rings in my eardrum. It always sounds like this: “Teacher, where are you going? Where is your home?” 출입문 닫겠습니다. Track two sends me uptown to Gwanghwamun, where I walk journal-in-hand past palaces and stop to eat street food. I’ve had every taste in every season. I try to hold them all in my too-small palms. Track three drags me downtown with the sunset. After two years: two placements, a different alphabet, hundreds of students’ faces I wonder if it is possible to love another city or two different countries so tightly. 이 역은 타는 곳과 전동차 사이가 넓습니다. Guro held nine roads, all leading me home. I tried to pick out the words I knew in the poems painted on the glass doors, feeling the breath of each train car’s mouth swallowing me and the rest of the crowd. I would do anything to go back. 내리실 때 조심하시기 바랍니다. I still use the same alarm. I wake up on time, after the subway car halts in my sleep. I miss the way I became food on the trains entering Guro Station, leaving crumbs in my splintering. Dawn Angelicca Barcelona was a 2014-2016 ETA at Yangji Elementary School in Sejong City and Sinmirim Elementary School in Seoul. She currently works on the talent and recruitment team at MuleSoft in San Francisco