Closing Credits
About the time when this especially appealing song is ending
I sluggishly emerge from the dark room and write its lyrics on the wall.
The lyrics I wrote last time are tangled up like vines on the wall.
I was suckling a woman's scanty breasts, drunk with the song,
Don't leave me, don't abandon me.
The lovers are grilling fish in the hay-smelling wall,
And the woman who abandoned me won't come looking for me.
The unknowable lyrics in the language of a foreign country are being written,
Smoothly untangled into my mother tongue,
As if they went through an automatic translator.
Every time I exhale, the tender young leaves and twigs of consonants and vowels fall.
I have to breathe in the blackish whirlwind and hold the breath.
In a confused dream I am transcribing the lyrics with my eyes closed, and suddenly
The sound of the song fades out into rain and snow and scatters.
I pull my ear.
I hurriedly push the wall open and take a step beyond the sound.
A woman, with deep-seated eyes that can barely see, wields her thin and bright arms.
The only hand that can cover your mouth is your hand, please stop, sweet baby.
This rotten foreign tongue, this song that calls for us, this depressing song is eating
through you.
Listen to the chorus of the dead who sing along every night, drunk with the spices
of your song.
Let me leave now.
If I knew the woman would be this sad, I would have started sooner.
I start off the song on a whim; my questionable remains will fill in the chorus.
Like sleet, which falls in the doubts of water,
When the wall smells like dried hay and a tender sound caresses my cheek,
I, asleep, rise, as if someone is leading me, and lick the wall
And slowly descend the old staircase in the wall.
The Guitarist on the Street
—"Don't come back," Mother
A woman on the street holds a guitar tightly. It's as if she would push her breast into it. She needs to sound the guitar and beg for dimes by any means necessary. She gets even more anxious when it starts raining. Since a guitar's genitals are its sound, she starts kicking her daughter.
Raindrops, clumsy in their landing, break their ankles as they touch the sidewalk. Rain crawls through the underpass. Is dragged on the ground. The guitar dangles on the violent woman's arm. There is a reason it cannot walk.
Pausing before putting a cigarette in her mouth, the woman plays with its sound. The guitar despises the woman and thus allows her. The guitar's genitals neither grow nor tremble; they have knots and strings.
There are twenty pages of newspaper and twenty-one pieces of rebar lying around in the basement. Eight hundred nautical miles of sadness, eight hundred nautical miles of hunger, and even a million miles of cockroaches are aware that growing is a sin.
The guitarist holds her daughter. As I look again, they are in the form of a guitar holding the woman. The guitar tightens its grip on the guitarist's neck. Its wrist is the wrist of an underdeveloped daughter who feels indecisive about whether to drop dead or not.
Jane Avril's mother forced her daughter to prostitute herself, and just like with guitars, there are many types of maternal instinct. The woman had the guitar by accident. The woman, together with the guitar, rolls down the staircase, falls over the guardrail, and plunges with the world. Surprisingly, some maternal instincts are just a cruel form of megalomania.
The guitar pushes the guitarist into the guitar case.
A Sealed Woman
The panties, soaked in menses, which started—earlier than the usual time of the month—while I was walking on the street. Wearing the panties that I took off from a Venus mannequin, I met up with him. Patterns of red tomatoes, the squishy seeds trickled down the crotch. The seaside motel, soaked in the smell of mudflats. The rooms' salty moaning, curses rolling on the creaking beds, curses. Vomiting the spermbugs that I struggled to swallow, I need to be plugged, even during my period, like a mannequin that finally stops feeling depressed only when sealed with a cock.
A waterbed, the billowing sea. A black whale, panting, swallows a mannequin, no, in the black stomach the mannequin is mincing the whale's heart with her plastic teeth.
In the casket of a white bathtub: through the red hole with a broken mesh strainer, jelly-like eyeballs, four of them, drain out before the bubbles. They go to the ocean, infiltrating a mammal's body, now sleek from a thousand years of erosion. The Mother that clings like tangled hair in a drainpipe is the source of the wailing that appears whenever I want to live. I want to go to the Urticate coast to follow the whales. You can go after killing me. Inside the Mother, who is already sprayed into the sea, there are hundreds, thousands of mothers in the midst of their water burial; if she lets me go, the dinner table under the sea will become amicable. So as not to surface again, I must be sealed deep in the sea bottom, like a casket.
Three Poems
Kim Yi-deum
translated from the Korean by Jiyoon Lee
Kim Yi-deum made her literary debut in 2001 in Poesie. Her books include three poetry collections, A Stain in the Shape of a Star (2005), Cheer up, Femme Fatale (2007), Inexpressible Love (2011), and a novel, Blood Sisters (2011). She won the first Poetry and the World Literary Award (2010) and the Kim Daljin Changwon Literary Award (2011). She received her PhD for her thesis on "Feminist Poems in Korea," and has been teaching at Kyungsang University. In 2012, she stayed at the Free University of Berlin as a writer in residence, participating in the Writer-in-Residence Abroad Program of the Arts Council Korea (ARKO). Action Books plans to publish a forthcoming English translation of her poems. She participates courtesy of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. She is currently working as a columnist for a Busan newspaper and as host of a poetry-themed radio program.
Jiyoon Lee received her MFA in Creative Writing from University of Notre Dame. She has two chapbooks: IMMA from Radioactive Moat Press and Funsize/Bitesize from Birds of Lace Press. Her first book Foreigner's Folly is forthcoming from Coconut Books.
