Between a Rice Bowl and Shadow
Time
POP! Over the asphalt I hear a tire popping. Within a few seconds the road is mangled. Birds cover the torn up road. When I hear the birds, I grow breathless and the edge of my rice bowl lifts from the corner of my dinner table. Shadows stick to the wrecked world. Rice bowls empty, water stops dripping, time deepens. If you touch between the cooling rice bowl and shadow, more and more of the road’s end is steeply erased.
Debt
Debt grows. Guilt grows in the east. The sun rises from guilt. My hands grow cold. An empty envelope flutters, undiscarded, alone on the desk. Because there’s a leak, the rain stains the wall. On a day like this, I order a noodle dish with black bean sauce. The phone rings like noodles drenched in black bean sauce. I don’t answer. The ringing piles up. When I walked behind my father’s casket, the sound of the wooden bell beat against me. A round vein is as sharp as a knife. Does blood forgive debt? I am moved by the smell of blood.
Content
I take the mirror from a wall and place it over the TV. Mirror above the TV, the calendar hanging next to the mirror, Paul Gauguin’s painting on the calendar. In one corner of the mirror a small child sits holding his chin. I rip out the child, Paul Gauguin’s painting in May, and break off one side of the TV antenna, which is already broken on the other side. I need to finish this by midday. Boxes and bags are stacked inside my house. I need to carry them across the river on my back. The contents are just stuffing.
A Bright Room
In the mirror the sound of rusted whistles piles up
In the mirror bent roads from everywhere pile up
Camel hoofprints hauling loads
In the mirror windows I’ve never seen pile up
In the mirror things that still have shapes pile up
In the mirror hands carry a key to the road
The aimlessly dim sky squats down, piling up
In the mirror there’s a place that can’t get any darker
In this place the blinking stars keep rolling around
In the mirror jagged transparent valleys cave in
Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick
She, sits in a chair, stares at the closed front door, from beneath the world’s, door the shadow noiselessly pauses, halts, the shadow strikes the vanishing, world the shadow moves, she, stays still, stares at the shadow, tick, tick, the shadow disappears, she, continues to stare at the door, pours water into a cup, the world sloshes, there’s an empty road inside the sloshing sound, the world spills over, the side of the cup, suddenly the sound of screeching brakes, she throws the cup hard, she flops down, on her bed, time’s crinkled hem under the blanket, she, strokes the blanket, while staring at the door, a thin ray of light seeps through the world’s door, the shadow enters again from beneath, little by little coming further into the room, the room darkens, the cup dries up to the point of combusting, she turns on the faucet, the world jammed up, inside the faucet, gushes out, the world splatters over her too, in an instant, she’s wearing layers of the world she, stretches out her hand, she searches for her wristwatch, she, finds it buried beneath the evening paper, she stares at the lock on the world’s door, as she picks up her watch, inside the world, the digital wristwatch ticks, ticks, ticks, ticks, the watch is moving, inside time’s hollow world.
Three Poems
Yi Won
translated from the Korean by E. J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Yi Won is one of South Korea’s contemporary women poets who subvert polite society and Korean literary culture using the language of death. Her language speaks to the senselessness of historical trauma against Korean women. Among predecessors like poet Kim Hyesoon, who speak to the body of a woman as a form of text, Yi Won stands out with anti-neocolonial poems of technology, lore, commercialism, and self-portraiture. She excavates Korea’s ancient past and the current immersion in technology and the Korean Wave, merging the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, as well as Korea’s history since the US intervention at the end of World War II. She uses this gap to strike at the heart of political disillusionment and the materiality of identity through radical form, gestures, and rhythm. Yi Won’s poetry is a part of Korea’s neglected history, pioneering a terrain of Korean women’s poetry that is visceral, inventive, and subversive to literary conventions. Her work, both a practice of writing and revolution, challenges expectations of delicate styles, favoring sharper expressions of the reality of Korean women’s lives.
Yi Won is the author of “When They Ruled the Earth” (1996), “A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo!” (2001), “The World’s Lightest Motorcycle” (2007), “The History of an Impossible Page” (2012), “Let Love be Born” (2017), and “I Am My Affectionate Zebra” (2018). Yi Won is currently a visiting professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and the memoir The Magical Language of Others (2020). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and American Literary Translators Association, among others.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (2016), which won the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She has received poetry fellowships from several organizations, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and is the program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
