On Their First Date

By DIANA KEREN LEE

My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.

Connect the dots between each falling flake.
My brothers and I were born, making five of us—
a star, a line that returns to where it began.

The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach,
through her hopes and dreams, a hole.
She belly-laughs when he pops through the open roof
of the bus that won’t hold his whole frame.

Crumbs of snow we hold onto to keep the path clear,
subtitles accumulating as they embrace.

 

[Purchase Issue 30 here.]

 

Diana Keren Lee is a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship winner and a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Wildness, and elsewhere, and she has received support from MacDowell and Yaddo. Born and raised in Austin, she lives in Colorado.

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

On Their First Date

Related Posts

Close-up of a field of rye

April 2026 Poetry Feature #1: Carson Wolfe, Benjamin Paloff, and Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
For years, I’ve been drafting a book / about trauma, how words may form / a likeness of the mind that’s torn— / the past tears easily as paper, I write. / And don’t the leaves on the ground / resemble ripped poems, as if the weather / keeps trying to find the right phrase, / all those crumpled revisions of the seasons.

Black and white portrait of a man wearing spectacles.

They Could Have

CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS
Near destitute, I’m this close to homeless. / This killer of a city, Antioch, / it’s eaten all the money I have, / this killer and its cost of living. // But I’m young, in the best health. / I speak a marvelous Greek / (and I know, I mean “know,” my Aristotle, Plato, / the orators, poets, the—well, you name them).