‘the snow reflecting off / your torch was the / colour of your thoughts’
‘No I’m not tired I said. / No I’m not thirsty I said. / I’m sassy.’
‘I wear my fear around me / I fan it out on my pillow’
‘I did not understand / the code that held / me to the world.’
‘This had happened once before, / when my life first split / into comfort and pain.’
‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’
‘I must / have been the only one to catch his eye, to hold it.’
‘Our nation is a spell of nerves and gas. We say yes to monsters, to elegies etched in our palms.’ Translated by Daniel Canty.
‘I see them as a needlepoint sampler, / flowing script that reads: everyone suffers.’
‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.
‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’
‘Things were starting to line up: history was speaking, which hardly ever happened to me.’
‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’
