After My First Breakup, My Father Writes His First Email

With his two index fingers — “the eagle method,”
as one says in Korea — he broaches everything else:

            the recent death of a Korean actress, lessons
            from the life of a sportswear brand chairman.

Then, a turn: I don’t like to use the word “love.”
It never feels complete.

            Away from him, me in my new country, everyone
            and everything is in love: I love
            your shoes, I love your hair, this, that, him, her.

When had my father and I said the word
to each other?

            How many times had I, picking up his call,
            ended it in a rush, bored, running
            to declare love to my boyfriend?

My teenage passions, precious;
my father’s loneliness, not my responsibility.

            My “wild goose father,” flying back and forth
            to see a closed room, only petulance left
            at the door, as I preened privately for nonexistent boys.

How easy it was to forget this man’s sensitivity,
his love for music, that he took saxophone lessons,

            coming home to an unlit apartment.
            A taciturn man, who sings alone.
            Who, when years later asked

what instrument he likes listening to the most,
said, the human voice.

Copyright © 2026 by Emily Jungmin Yoon.

“I was sifting through an email account that’s over twenty years old to make space in its storage. I found this email that my dad wrote for the first time in his life, after I got my heart broken. I was moved, and heartbroken again, imagining him typing this up in [South] Korea, away from his family; seeing that I never replied; realizing that I had forgotten all about this email. I wrote this poem to belatedly acknowledge and fill my gaps in memory with these moments of tenderness, in which he was often clumsy but was nevertheless at his sincerest.” - Emily Jungmin Yoon

Emily Jungmin Yoon is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections Find Me as the Creature I Am (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024) and A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018). In 2017, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Yoon currently serves as the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and she is an assistant professor of Korean literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She splits her time between Honolulu and South Korea.

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