Lim Solah
Translated from the Korean by Oh Eunkyung & Olan Munson

I go to drink the vending machine lights. I insert the coins I was fiddling with. I like how the machine lights up. I like shaking hands with paper cups. Warm as newborn quails. I like engraving teeth marks on the rim. I leave the cup on a chair. It becomes trash, becomes a letter.

I like how raindrops call out to me tenaciously on stormy nights. I like how they call my name twice. My name which is hard to pronounce. I cast off clothes to pretend I don't know my own name. I like pulling those clothes over my head. I like my body thawing in the downpour. Assailed by that downpour. I like how demons and angels below the Catholic steeple corrode in equal measure.

Raindrops will collect in the paper cup letter. The drops will gather and engrave a cloud. The abundant spring-green hands of a sycamore tree will flutter. This is how it gestures both farewell and fare well. This is how I leave while I stay.

from the journal SALT HILL
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The last line of Lim Solah’s poem in the Korean plays on the difference between two ways to say goodbye—one would be used when you (the speaker) are sending off another person, and the other if you yourself are the departing person. To convey what is embedded into common Korean expressions for farewell, we’ve expanded the last line into two and attempted our own wordplay in the English.  
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Eduardo Corral Discusses Queerness in Poetry

"The Lambda Literary Foundation recently awarded Eduardo Corral, an assistant professor in the Department of English, a Lambda Literary Award in the category of Gay Poetry for his second collection of poems, 'Guillotine.' A self-described 'slow writer,' Corral centered themes of the Mexican-American borderlands and queerness in the collection."

via TECHNICIAN
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Front cover of The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
What Sparks Poetry:
Charles Baxter on Theodore Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse"

"When a poem begins to pile up the similes, comparing an object to multiple other objects, there’s going to be trouble. Multiple similes signify instability. An emotional shift is likely to take place, a disappearance or a metamorphosis. What we get in the second part of 'The Meadow Mouse' is a disappearance."
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