You are not there as a matter of course. You carry the box you dust in. You kick the dog wayside, no telling what’s worse: the damage you carry or damage picked clean from the teeth and spat out. What is hurt when your own animal yelps and retreats to a corner of the room? What bares better its knives and cleans a bone than your own cruel fangs. You animal. You master of damage. You bad dog.
Your light comes through this minimal heaven to rattle the dustbin you’re dogged All your weight slung into this white hole. Where have you been this whole time? Where?
땅 파고 지랄 떠는 그 새끼
My language is a worry the world can’t convince me I’m right.
I’m a man who hugs head-cocked into an abacus. I kiss
the dirt with my knees, count the last bar of my wife’s song.
I lose my wife to a bet. Hang a sign she can’t see
on her wrist. Tie up her hair in a pony
knot, yoke her to a marketplace, give up my riches.
My wife gives children I wanted and dies.
Pay off my debt, debtor. Move her to a vault where no fault
is this honest: endless green beauty with lightning streaks,
an odor of doubt brocaded on my coat. A bastard digs his own pothole.
Jimin Seo moved to the US when he was 8. He lives between Manhattan and Cochecton, NY with his partner Gabriel. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and teaches at Baruch College. His manuscript "Furniture Music" was a finalist for the Nighboat Book Prize in 2022. His poems can be found or are forthcoming in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, and The Bronx Museum.
