Joan Kwon Glass
How beautiful it is, and how easily it can be broken.
—Tennessee Williams
1987
At Novi's 12 Oaks Mall in 1987 all things were possible:
pink mini-skirts, towers of buttons for jean jackets, pierced ears,
a mixtape you design in your head, not yet made.
One August day my mother and I sat together at the mall's A&W,
bought fish filet sandwiches and root beer after clothes shopping for a new school year.
She'd barely spoken all morning so finally I asked her what was wrong
and she ran out of the restaurant, sat sobbing on a bench,
head in her hands: Your father left us. He's gone for good.
Everything in the mall shrank down, became miniature,
and my mother and I were suddenly giants in a world of small objects.
I was ten years old, queen of small things.
I held her, sat up straight, told her everything would be okay.
The parade of tiny families strolled by with their shopping bags and strollers,
so small I could have crushed them beneath my Keds.
1990
On Saturdays in ninth grade I asked my mom to drop me off at 12 Oaks
so I could steal small animal figurines from Hallmark.
Much to my mother's dismay, I'd recently stopped going to church.
Now, my weekly ritual consisted of slipping miniature animals
into my purse where they tossed and turned as I walked.
At home I'd arrange them along my bedroom shelves methodically,
sometimes by species, other times by size or color.
Once they attended a concert in which the sheep sang Pavarotti-style
and the puppies were his back-up dancers.
I exiled the weak ones to the back.
Soon I would shift my focus to older men, meet them in library parking lots,
let their hands and their attention shape me into someone else.
But for now I curated small objects, sat on my bed and imagined
a world in which being queen of a glass menagerie could be enough.
In the scenes I curated, they were always facing me:
tiny, eyeless, glass elephant with pink trunk, bashful black bear
grinning and holding a Valentine, ceramic poodle on her haunches,
fur raised into peaks I'd press my fingers onto so they almost punctured my skin.