Outside the gallery the squirrels clean their faces with their precise hands. I feel each tooth distinctly in my mouth, hope the pipes will burst themselves just so something will have happened while I sat here. Tomorrow I'll read an article and discover things that seem pertinent but aren't—bright spots on a dwarf planet, mice who don't respond to positive reinforcement, a rat who keeps hitting a button no matter how high up the pain is tuned. The moon is lidless and wilted in the sky. The nice forks are forgotten, nestled in the back of a drawer somewhere. Outside the gallery I watch a girl ask her mother for change for the payphone. She'll say hello to the chipper buzz of static on the other side. I would like to bring you forth now please, I would like the corridors in the center of myself to switch on their low-lights so I can place my feet more carefully. I'm here in person to find the imperfect places where the artist's hand quivered. To see the non-facsimile version of paintings I still can't touch. The girl is pacing back and forth in my mind inside her payphone booth. Her pennies are like fancy moths. The streetlight peeks in but from an odd angle, and so she has to turn backwards, forwards, to locate the source of the light.
"Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea...Choi’s stripped-down poetry is breathtaking and frightening. Her poems are uncompromising because she will stare into the infinite dark tunnel of her solitude and not break that stare. She writes, with terrifying alacrity, the existential despair of living in a hierarchical society where free will is a joke."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."
