For years I walked around feeling holy. Bright light descended to touch my face & bright light rosefrom my face in answer. Birds communicated with me & omensexisted. When the last apple fell from the wintering apple treeI knew what it meant& I told everyone. & everyone believed me. Everyonemade soft noisesin the backs of …
This piece by Kim Hoyeonjae is translated from Chinese into English by Suphil Lee Park Translator’s Note Kim Hoyeonjae 김호연재 / 金浩然齋 (1681–1722) is a Korean poet. Her work, like others of the mid-Joseon dynasty, is composed of Chinese characters, reflective of Korea’s history of diglossia. This divide between the vernacular Korean and the Chinese …
This piece by Kim Hoyeonjae is translated from Chinese into English by Suphil Lee Park Translator’s Note Kim Hoyeonjae 김호연재 / 金浩然齋 (1681–1722) is a Korean poet. Her work, like others of the mid-Joseon dynasty, is composed of Chinese characters, reflective of Korea’s history of diglossia. This divide between the vernacular Korean and the Chinese …
When the birds’ names doubled with words that summonedideas from their hiding places (the flicker, the chat, the swift, the lark),I watched them more closely, confident that somewhere a thought would escape the bird, buoyed upon a pun, and I’d find meaning in a world that glidedabove me, dipping hardly into my mind.When I saw …
I tell my father about the mnemonic techniques of Greek and Roman orators—They’d construct palaces in their minds, affixing—to this archway, to that dome—portions of speeches they hopedto remember.He needs a trick to remind himmy mom has started chemotherapy.This is why she looks pale right now. This is why her hair is falling out.I need …
In the beginning, the gesture occurs without a thought:I reach for the word you can’t grasp and pass it to you like a bowl filled with rice.You spoon the rice onto your plate and pass back the empty bowl.At this point,the rounded space the bowl surrounds is not an image of loss.
imagine you without you. imagine lopping off your fingers with a jigsaw, distracted by the gunfire and church bellsof a Hells Angels funeral.here, see the market at Chapultepec, the tortas ahogadas, the chapulines, the hundreds of Virgens de Guadalupe painted onto tiles meant for gardens and labyrinthsand kitchens, the dozens of copies of Mein Kampf.Coyote …
for the nun Ryōnen Gensō (1646–1711)Years until you take the tonsure, years until I learn to learn, and I can’t stand to sit inside the crawl space of this wordso I’ll turn it to a window, open it to you, pretend it’s different when you speak it—just the tree, a murmuring eternity,I’ll believe our living …
Star Lake, July 2003It happened overnight, like waking to the first snow: each tree branch bowing under sudden weight, covered, every inch, in caterpillars. They wormedaround by the hundreds. Rocks appeared to vibrate, bark looked to be swimming in algae. My cousins & I spent the day sawing their fuzzy bodies in half,just to make …
Of course, it’s empty now, the library, besides glass blown from window frames, books warped & torn over years of weather bursting into the dark building. Doom & I release handslike we always do when taking stock of a new place, or an old one made new by storms, as we step through one of …