EASTERN IOWA REVIEW
  • Home
    • About Us
    • Masthead
    • Port Yonder Press >
      • Chapbooks
    • Eastern Iowa Review
  • Guidelines
  • Current Issue
    • Issue 16 - Come, Wander
  • Past Issues
    • Lyric Essay Issues >
      • The Lyric Essay
      • Issue 10 - Spring 2020
      • Issue 8 - Spring 2019
      • Issue 7 - Print Anthology
      • Issue 6 - 2018
      • Issue 3 - 2017 >
        • Editors Note - Issue 3
      • Issue 2 - 2016
      • Issue 1 - 2015
    • Themed Issues >
      • Issue 15 - Love
      • Issue 14 >
        • Those Elves - Origin Story
        • Those Elves - The Collection
      • Issue 13 - Winter
      • Issue 12 - Water
      • Issue 11 - Hope in Renewal (An Intermission)
      • All Things Anne - Issue 9
      • Issue 5 - The SmartApocalypse
      • Issue 4 Contributors & Samples
  • 3 Sisters Awards
    • The Christine Prose Poetry Award
    • Dory Ann Fiction Award
    • Maggie Nonfiction Award
  • More
    • The Prose Poem
    • Fictions >
      • Contemporary Mystery
      • Dark Fiction
      • Debut Fiction
      • Fan Fiction
      • Honorable Mentions
      • Literary Fiction
      • Mythical Fiction
      • Speculative Fiction
      • Woods-Western-Mountain-Appalachian
      • Young Author
      • Unclassifiable
    • Prizes
    • Interviews
    • List of Contributors


​PROSE POETRY​


ANGIE KANG


​carnage


When my mother excavates pomegranates, she takes tweezers to the inner lining to preserve each jeweled seed. Systemic unwrapping of skin for bloody clusters of sheathed joy. When she finishes, my mom hands me the entire bowl. I am edacious and inelegant, sticky fuchsia tears dripping through cracks of both palms. A thank you between mouthfuls feels flippant; instead, I say nothing, which is wrong, and of this knowledge I do nothing, which is worse. My mom watches silently. Of course it doesn’t take very long for my fingers to scrape the bottom of delight. I leave the kitchen full of pomegranate and my mom with its flayed rubbery remains. I decide if I have a daughter, I might peel pomegranates for her too. Maybe I’ll give her chopsticks to make the seeds last and her savor my labor. More likely, when I see stubby half-formed fingers reaching towards me, I will willingly succumb to her wanting.
​



Angie Kang is an illustrator and writer living in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Offing, The Rumpus, Porter House Review, Hobart, and others. Find more of her work at www.angiekang.net, or on instagram @anqiekanq.
All rights reserved.
© 2012-2023, Port Yonder Press LLC
6332 - 33rd Avenue Drive, Shellsburg IA
www.PortYonderPress.com