Half the Blood
Yes I saw the river redden as it parted
When I locked my body with the first key
and opened the blood-gates with the second
flowers poured out through a crack in the night
fading as they met in this strange new kingdom
Flowers erupt through the body
Today I call blood leaking from vessels
the lips of an adulteress
When I stroke my cheek with one hand
and erase my forehead with the other
the evening bleeds out
like lovers parting at the border
like the sun collapsing with its face on the water
blurring the boundaries of the world
Erasable Seeds
Tonight I’ve curled up with a grape in my mouth. With black liquids overflowing from a dream, the grape sheds its tender skin and sinks deep into the earth. Even as the seeds I swallowed without chewing have suffused my bones, transplanting my blood vessels with tiny roots. A plant’s quilt, weaving roots long and thin. When I understand trees and cradle my bones, my skin disappears and my body melts in many directions. I love ripe things. The things that get helplessly squished in between. But could I love your bones? White tree bark protruding from a scraped knee. A seed is not the afterlife of a tree, but the original piece that’s been lost. When a grape seed gradually flows into the root, it fits the last puzzle piece, completing the tree. I know there are faces spreading ceaselessly, just as green seeps out of a dead fence. I know there is a newly thickening forest. Extending our grape vines, we kiss. To find the small, hard seed inside each other’s bodies. We melt it in our mouths for a long, long time before swallowing.
Unexpected Vanilla
It glided along the groove of my ear. Vanilla on the tip of my tongue, dribbling down the subtle bumps.
To keep a universal expression as I scraped all those seeds. With a fluttering heart, I memorized foreign names. My first sensation of sweetness. A special appetite for what vanishes.
It’s true, some hands and knees were melting. We created each other with strokes running hot and cold. In the territory of sound, I’m a flower reclining vertically. Blossoming before a fingertip. The word bosom melts and melds upon contact.
That type of vanilla. To keep my eyeballs adequately viscous, I love strangers the most. Some eyelids grew whole the moment we lost them. They slid and waved their gentle tentacles before falling, heavy with wet.
Receiving the Runny Red Gem
You said you found a snowflake that never melts
the home of the blister growing day by day
We held our breath to erase the boundary of air
Then strange blood seeped from our
tangled tongues and laced fingers
I lowered my head and hid my tongue
until sticky juices dripped between our lips
When I molded the oozing
sap into a secret seed
a berry began to swell
the small warm berry that never wore down
however many times I rolled it around in my mouth
Lalala, Cherries
Hello, I’m going cherry picking I want to fill my pockets with only the ones stained dark Cherries are red copying another red Shall we fill our mouths with cherries and kiss naughtily knottily all night long?
Cherries strip off their flowers and leaves Today they’re just kernels of play
Her cherry hasn’t even had a chance to ripen and burst, to schmooze and ooze We only got to bite into a clump of green And now the season’s almost over We were harvested too soon I want to swirl my paints inside her mouth This is the time of cherries A time that stains
Unexpected Vanilla
Lee Hyemi
translated from the Korean by So J. Lee
Listen to the original Korean read by the poet:
I found her while cruising the library. Assigned to find a poet whom I hadn’t translated before, I scanned the shelves of the poetry section until a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I started reading and kept reading, immersing myself in Lee Hyemi’s sensual and surrealist poetics. I was instinctively drawn to it, and that was how I knew I’d found my next project.
But was it queer? There was the poem “The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” that unequivocally addresses an unni, an older girl—and “Femdom,” whose title speaks for itself. It was all there in the text, and yet… It was a familiar feeling, of getting “vibes” from someone but not being entirely sure. I Googled, Naver’d, and even DBpia’d the collection, hoping someone would agree with and/or confirm my suspicions. But nothing! Almost every book of Korean poetry is accompanied by a critical essay, and the one for Unexpected Vanilla, with its thorough examination of Lee’s symbolism, didn’t mention any of her sexual references.
And yet… To borrow Juana María Rodríguez’s words, “It is sexual in the queerest of ways, meant to inspire intense feeling rather than reproduction; it is multisensory, asynchronic, polysemous, perverse, and full of promise.” Incidentally, three out of the three poems that Lee’s lesbian friends have jokingly criticized for being “too explicit” (in both senses of the word) were chosen by Asymptote.
In Unexpected Vanilla, Lee Hyemi writes a sexual present for readers to behold, a present that can’t be located within straight time. For this reason, I want to put Lee’s poetry in conversation with Mary Jean Chan’s essay “Queerness as Translation: From Linear Time to Playtime” in Modern Poetry in Translation, where Lee was first published in English. Chan writes, “Linear time suffocates; it forces the now into the future and refuses any meaningful engagement with the past. I want, instead, to inhabit a state of play—a form of playtime—where time dissolves and there is only being, breath, and the myriad of languages we allow ourselves to inhabit and speak.”
A special part of translating Lee was learning about her surrealist influence and considering how much of the spontaneous expression of the subconscious in a technique like automatism should be reflected in my own translation practice as well as the resulting poems. Well, today, kernels of play, I say!
But was it queer? There was the poem “The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” that unequivocally addresses an unni, an older girl—and “Femdom,” whose title speaks for itself. It was all there in the text, and yet… It was a familiar feeling, of getting “vibes” from someone but not being entirely sure. I Googled, Naver’d, and even DBpia’d the collection, hoping someone would agree with and/or confirm my suspicions. But nothing! Almost every book of Korean poetry is accompanied by a critical essay, and the one for Unexpected Vanilla, with its thorough examination of Lee’s symbolism, didn’t mention any of her sexual references.
And yet… To borrow Juana María Rodríguez’s words, “It is sexual in the queerest of ways, meant to inspire intense feeling rather than reproduction; it is multisensory, asynchronic, polysemous, perverse, and full of promise.” Incidentally, three out of the three poems that Lee’s lesbian friends have jokingly criticized for being “too explicit” (in both senses of the word) were chosen by Asymptote.
In Unexpected Vanilla, Lee Hyemi writes a sexual present for readers to behold, a present that can’t be located within straight time. For this reason, I want to put Lee’s poetry in conversation with Mary Jean Chan’s essay “Queerness as Translation: From Linear Time to Playtime” in Modern Poetry in Translation, where Lee was first published in English. Chan writes, “Linear time suffocates; it forces the now into the future and refuses any meaningful engagement with the past. I want, instead, to inhabit a state of play—a form of playtime—where time dissolves and there is only being, breath, and the myriad of languages we allow ourselves to inhabit and speak.”
A special part of translating Lee was learning about her surrealist influence and considering how much of the spontaneous expression of the subconscious in a technique like automatism should be reflected in my own translation practice as well as the resulting poems. Well, today, kernels of play, I say!
Lee Hyemi is the author of Ultraviolet (Changbi Publishers, 2011) and Unexpected Vanilla (Moonji Publications, 2016). In 2006, at age 18, she became the youngest winner of the JoongAng Literary Newcomer’s Prize after novelist Choi In-ho won in 1963. Lee is currently a Ph.D. student in Korean literature at Korea University and enjoys deep-sea diving.
So J. Lee is a translator and writer. She studied English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her translations of Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla have won LTI Translation Grants and appeared in Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Korean Literature Now.
