Lim Solah
Translated from the Korean by Olan Munson & Oh Eunkyung
The flower print dress I forgot about
gets caught on my fingers.
How strange. That I used to wear something like this.
I pull out more strange clothes and try them on.

When I grab a kitchen knife to kill myself
I find a rice paddle in my hand.
I shovel rice into my mouth with the paddle. And just like that,

“Have you eaten?” asks my mom.
I hang up.
Why do we always have to talk about rice?
These days I eat everything.

Black soybeans, cotton swabs, drain cleaner, Saejol Station on the 8th at 3pm.
Pay rent. 330,000 won.

I jotted this on a Post-it so I wouldn’t forget.
But I forget where I put it.

Black soybeans in the refrigerator. Utterly, blackly, forgotten.
Why do small sprouts grow on these rancid beans?

Mom spreads her toast with moldy jam.
“It’s still sweet.”

Mom gulps expired milk.
“It tastes just fine.”
Whenever the words I want to die boil inside me.

I scoop rice in my mouth
just like Mom.

Mom must’ve held the rice paddle in her hand too.
She must’ve reached for the rice paddle first thing in the morning.

How come I can’t forget the taste of rice?
How do the necks of flowers twist
together towards the sun?
How is wonder so gross?

Again I clasp the broken watch on my wrist
and put on the flower print dress.
I flop down into a flower garden
flowerless.
from the book GROTESQUE WEATHER AND GOOD PEOPLE / Black Ocean
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"A Conversation with Claire Schwartz"

"I tend to think of a lecture as a didactic presentation issued by someone in a position of authority, but its root—to read—jostles inside of it. The writer and the reader collude to make meaning—or they struggle toward it, split it open, revise the terms of what might be possible. Throughout Civil Service there are various “lecture” poems that open up concepts whose meanings bind social formations—time, the house, loneliness, etc."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robin Myers on Javier Peñalosa M.'s "The Crane"


"I’d describe 'The Crane' as a deceptively narrative poem, in the way that a dream can present what feels like a coherent story you’ll then struggle to recapitulate once you’re conscious again. The story, as it were, is more like a snapshot remembered: the speaker finds an injured crane in a boat by a riverbank and uses an oar to put the bird out of its misery, an act that fills him both with shame and with a feeling of identification he can’t quite describe."
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