05-05-2025
신 선 영 (Sun Yung Shin)
TRANSLATE THIS BODY INTO EVERYTHING
with thanks to Harryette Mullen
Here I am at the inconvenience
store of unspoken words. Rows of soft
silence. The produce
of our Korean families. 5,000 years
+
of the People in White. We are the girls
who went away, who left memory behind,
who ate pebbles and stopped talking.
We each need a librarian, an army of
+
alphabets to keep us warm at night,
when our voices stiffen to copper and tin.
When our grandmothers dissolve into mist
and our grandfathers mold wives out of dirt.
+
Here we are at the corner of the past and fate
no one discovered except American day
by American night. Work. Switching faces was easier
than trading one tongue for another.
+
How do we pronounce our skin in English,
turn our silences inside out like a fox-fur stole.
The Korean fox with nine tails is a demon,
always a woman, her heart thick with dreams
+
of human sacrifice, of the future of nature.
Korean girls who slept with the dictionary
so they would never be alone, so one day
they could give birth to bruises and poetry.
THE WOLVISH FORAGE
The poetics of wolvish space and the displacement of air with the hot
breath of the future.
I fell asleep in their den, which filled with night-serum, and the
medicine became my lungs as I wandered through the rough carbon
sleep of abandoned coal mines and saw my spirit panning for gold in
the streams and creeks of the dead.
I saw us there.
Lingering over the remains of a spectacular
glittering feast.
Part I. Burn and Eat
Each day was a gorgeous wet machine with the rain-slicked bridge
under the night bridge. We walked together along its swaying cables
and let the water fall wanton from our necks.
I’ve written your undertow into my will, have signed it with a fistful
of salt. This wound is my latest resort. My heart: its secret pangs like
a muffled church bell. My eyes: hard gates.
You made me into a wolf. Before, I ate everything bleating and
shivering. Before, I lay myself down.
You signed this contract. You summoned the wailing wall. You made
a socket out of our last night.
We turned into swallows and sewed our open mouths, open to eat
wind, open to make room for ghosts, open for the pack of wolves.
In this wolvish congress with the letters of the dead and my appetite
for graffiti and my genuflection to the twenty-six occult symbols:
leopards and glass and fury and waxwing flight.
Each day is a prince on his lesser throne with his lesser hate. His
brother strange and left in the forest.
Every night is a widow.
What the outside woman craves is the strange testimony of the despot.
The law and the police report in illegible half-tongues.
If you could swallow scissors and thread and birth something durable.
Birth your own face and body, but burning on the outside instead of
the inside.
The despot is the gloat of caw and mercury and an army of centaurs en
route to the farthest necropolis.
The pack of wolves inside me spent a year in silence. I studied the
corpses of flight. I studied the architecture of wind, the ships breech
birthed on surprised shores, coasts with chronic insomnia, facing
always the wet suffocation of the great black fish with no face. The
wolf pack gnaws on a manuscript of organs, each with a hood, each
harboring its own verses.
Summon the heart’s four-chambered congregation. We will chase our
wolves through the starving blue to the piquant red. What kind of
recovery does the tongue make in its dark, narrow room.
All the strange velvet inside me, rooms and rooms of it: a suite of
crimes and a sibling, sharing duration, sharing a soldier’s reprieve.
My body is a kind of necropolitan cradle, a museum blazing on the
inside of the world’s last night circus.
If I vanish after a certain conjuring, follow the spelling, follow the
leopards with human hearts in their mouths, follow the scent of singed
fur, as walking through flames is often required to renew the hollows
of the world.
When I gave the wolves my opera glasses, binoculars, magnifying
glass, telescope, pinhole camera, and a set of sharpened knives, they
set fires all along the tree line.
They set to polishing the world’s remaining lonely library carrels,
eating the empty space along the way.
The perimeter of the bed is guarded by my soldier-wolves. The rough
black of their scarves caught in my hair, binding my hands.
Part II. In the City of God
Perhaps born in a crime scene. Perhaps drawn from my mother as
though an exorcism of pins and needles. Perhaps a child is a prosthesis
and a pantomime. Perhaps a child is a cauterization of an oblivion.
No matter because I am a maker of tourniquets and a hawker of all the
holy orders of the world.
God has chosen me. I leave the knitting of my white cloths and send the
wolves inside me to the grotto with that vintage water from snowmelt.
That water that tastes of the birth of planets, of the iron moon and its
magnetic dreams writing roses all over the night.
We wear our skin like a priest disgraced in his winter hunger.
Perhaps my private hospital business will expand into purgatorial burial
ritual and the eros of prayer. They will come from far and wide not to
be stitched back together like dolls but to pay homage to me as if I were
a man who hoards the calamitous light under his robes, a scholar of
usury. Perhaps I was born to be a minister of handbills and rainwater.
A human-headed bird made its arrival night after night. I fell down
upon things that are hidden during the day, which advance upon me at
night, which draw my lightless body downward toward their receding
forms, which remind me I have submerged the boat of my enemies and
brought myself to silence.
I surrendered my mask and maps and deck of cards to God who made
me his property without quarantine or inventory. A plate of ozone
slipped under the cell door, the key made of mushrooms and eaten every
morning. A shadow brings me a kind of a spike to bleed the humors. He
promises new veins. He promises gifts like morphine and exams I’ve
already taken.
In this city of God, all the stones rose surprised before me. The stigma
of childhood marks my palms and feet. Orphaned by pain, I felt
nothing, though I attempted repair of the body’s summers through
a kind of Christmas pageant.
Then, a swim through the dream of olive groves.
Then, the quilting of music into twelve gowns.
Then, the eating of worms.
Then, the gathering of incomplete births.
We fell upon the placenta still pulsing like a heart, and gorged on it like
a pack of dogs.
We shall be purified. We were promised.
We were soaked in rum and honey and as drunk as choirboys.
Many anonymous eyes all over their unnamable bodies and their backs
made blank for punishment.
One day, I was offered an advance cremation.
Why wait, I thought, let the gross body fall away, let me save the
organs for later, let me fill these jars I have inherited from my mother’s
mother, let me empty them in that field down there.
Let me bury my brothers who come endlessly from over that hill, who
come like a line of ants, like a swarm of bees, like a ring of fire.
Part III. Here I Will Abandon Laziness
From the eastern gate to the western gate, I made a womb out of a
sparrow’s nest, made every meal out of moss and the scorned end of each
hour. I used my palm as a cutting board, made a child out of forbidden
grammar. A grimoire, a child of pure glamour, a child not to be looked
at directly, a child to walk ahead and not look back.
I orphaned myself every morning and every night.
I let the wolves out of my mouth at noon and swallowed them for
dinner. I never fell into despair. I reused every letter, as frugal women
are taught to do.
I wrote several martial epics while my husbands were away at the wars.
I abandoned all ghosts who entered me with good intentions.
EVOLUTION IN THE UNDERWORLD
Vocabulary lessons in the afterlife become affairs of high ritual. To
hold a wood pencil in the hand again is a great pleasure. A hexagon to
keep it from rolling away, to provide rest and silence, readiness. The
dark sheen of the graphite letters appearing on the white paper. We
make a kind of drunkenness of it. A line never was so handsome.
Touching the paper as if it might be skin. With more I could draw and
fill in a shadow for each of us. To make our own marks again as we did
up above. I have nearly forgotten how bright it could be—as if the sun
fell open like a cut lemon.
Time fluttered away like old paper. Burials of things were a form of
magic. To cast a spell, to find the right person among all the persons
of the underworld. To wait for the right person to arrive below, as if
lowered on a thread. To practice patience like a spider in the dark.
To be held by an invisible web, to feel gravity gently pull on your limbs
like a lover.
To sit like a monk, with bombs raining all above—this is the one
roof that will hold against. Why must the living assault us with their
language? Crematorium, mausoleum, interment, as if Latin were
still alive on paper to make containers for the dead. We have our own
coliseum. We have a circus. We remember bread and distractions.
Each week we sit down to our lessons like cats waiting for a mouse
parade. Hungry for words, for soft strings of them. As if we had brought
an army of silk worms with us, to serve us. We recall our first word:
panoply. a complete or impressive collection of things. a splendid display.
a complete set of arms or suit of armor. The death of completion. A kind
of printmaking. Engraving. An impression, some kind of print on
something yielding.
Desire moves through glass to the objects on the other side. This
perpetual motion is a liquid like gold. Try to remember the difference
between solid and vapor. What is heat. The excitement of molecules
and rearrangement of the spirit. Electricity follows me, still, a personal
weather. My school mimics the cosmos.
Our school welcomes the dead with a mantle of petals. We have a
panoply of orchards. We have everything of everything. Everything
you lost is here. You are what others have lost.
You are here. Finally, there is enough.
The others, the others who lost you? They will find you here, in the
school, in the school of infinity.
-from The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press), celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections The Wet Hex (winner of the Midland Authors Society Award for Poetry and finalist for a Minnesota Book Award) Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson and picture book Where We Come From, co-written with Diane Wilson, Shannon Gibney, and John Coy. Her forthcoming picture book, Revolutions are Made of Love: Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, co-written with Mélina Mangal, will be published in 2025. She is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and elsewhere. She is a former MacDowell fellow and has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.