An Electronic Literary Journal

TWO POEMS by Jimin Seo

Nov 14, 2022

—

Jimin Seo

in Issue 25

from Crown for Peasant Heads

그
래

니
가

없
는

건

당
연
하
지

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

Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and BA from Florida State University. He is the author of OSSIA, a winner of The Changes Book Prize judged by Louise Glück. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina‘s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.