issue 32: winter 2025
KIM HYESOON
Double Life of Vowels
Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi
The poems in translation are from If Earth Dies, Who Will Moon Orbit? Scheduled to be published by New Directions in 2027.
Double Life of Vowels
Mommy puts the hospice full of white beds into a glass mixer and finely grinds it
Or is it the giant mixer that’s grinding Mommy?
The hospice is filled with stories unspoken as words
like dust flakes hovering in sunlight
Mommy sometimes grinds the sky in the mixer
also the sea and mountains
Now Mommy won’t have anything to do with flour, rice, veggies, fish, and such
Mommy grinds only big things like Earth, known as the big clock, to make a second hand
She doesn’t even offer me the cup of all the things she has pulverized
She only shares it with hospice grannies
What kind of magic potion is this?
When I stole some and ate it
my body got hot, and it felt as if my whole body was crumbling
Is this how it feels to become a bat in a desert cave?
I was dead before I died and
I was already friends with trees, mountains, and sea
In the snow dictionary, the word “white” didn’t exist and
the word “blue” didn’t exist in the blue ocean dictionary
My body filled up with the knowledge only I have about snow and ocean
I took off my glasses because all this could be said to be a dream if I kept them on
All the words and sentences were replaced by a single syllable
Probably a single vowel that had discarded the consonants
A single vowel filled the room completely
then another vowel filled the room again
Really, there was nothing in the world except for vowels
Genealogy of Ache
Trees all stay the same
yet the forest plunges
Words all stay the same
yet the dictionary plunges
In the house of letters, its baby
puckers her lips then opens them
to bring Letter Mommy
She puckers more tightly
to bring Letter Daddy
This time, she ruptures her lips
to bring Letter Ache
Long, long ago, in a tiny house in the forest
where two toilets lived
a door opens creakcreakcreak
Fingers latch onto Ache’s ankle
The bed is just a bed frame
Rumor has it that the table intermittently
suffers from phantom pain
Furniture all stays the same
but the house plunges straight down
Mommy says that a woman’s voice shouldn’t leave the house
A screaming dark thicket flows from the faucet
Mommydaddy can’t get into the water
so Ache locks up Ache in the bathtub
Ache comes out of the tub every time as rusted Ache
Wind stays still
yet the tub runs away
Mommydies Daddydies
Stepbabystepmommystepdaddy in the house
Stepstepbabystepstepmommystepstepdaddy
live again in the house, fused together
In the house of green peas, a green-pea-like family
In the house of peanuts, a peanut-like family
Ache stays on endlessly
endlessly as constipation
and has a habit of staring at the window across the way
has a habit of mumbling to her imaginary daughter,
How fortunate that you aren’t born
Dark ink stays motionless
yet the smell of the hand holding a pen of insultshamedisgrace
Smell of my poem
hidden inside the piece of paper
Black Horse’s Dark Face
Put the black glove on its dark lips. Black lips lick the back of my head.
I look back, the black horse’s head.
Black mane, dark eyes, nose, and mouth of the black horse’s face. Downcast eyes. Its eyelashes are too long. Its black mane flutters. Its face, darker than night, is too dark even for ghosts to detect. I wrap my face once, twice, a hundred times, and when I open my eyes inside the bundle, I see black smoke in front of me. Black horse’s face. The light in my eyes. My face.
So, I’m dead, already.
I’ve always been curious about what might be inside the colorful bundles of artist Kim Soo-ja. When Mommy died, my sister and I left the hospital room with Mommy wrapped in a long bundle. My body. C is for conceal. T is for tighttight. Desolate trees. Blood entangled like roots. Asphalt wet like an inkstone. Petals hovering in a rainstorm like torn tissues. Soaked feminine napkins. How many reds are there in this world? Red outfits of priests, bishops, cardinals. I peer inside darkness, a room packed with sleek, gigantic, black outfits.
When I drink coffee, there’s a forest inside it. Hidden forest. When I sing, there’s a forest inside the song. Hidden forest. Forest that grows nightmares. Conceal c. Tighttight t. Become Ms. A and Ms. B. I jot each down. Regarding women. My child, my friend, my mourners at my funeral won’t understand one bit. I become a grown-up, yet there’s still the forest. Whirlwind forest. Tighttight forest. When I unwrap the bundle with an aborted baby inside, there’s the forest again.
Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?
I rummage through the SoundCloud as I walk. I’ve listened to a thousand preludes. I didn’t look back even though the black horse’s dark face was so near me. At the feet of the cardinal, I dropped my thousand petalless hearts, left only with pistils.
My pitch-dark face inside the pitch-dark forest.
I live as my baby’s deceased.
Like peeling an apple, I peel the skin of light. When the moon rises like a fleshy fruit, my teeth ache, and the flowerbed has just one hue, the color that has its color stolen. Tonight, such merciful calamity. Wherever I search, there are petals like venomous moths. Insects that can only say, Be quiet. Be quiet, be quiet. Insects of tinnitus. Are cockroaches in sleek outfits also insects? I dare to ask myself, riding in a roach-like, shiny black car!
I gotta go. Gotta go. My face is wrapped inside the bundle. Hey girl! When I look back, there’s the black horse’s dark face.
Kim Hyesoon is a poet, essayist, and critic from South Korea. She was the first woman-identifying poet to win the Midang Literature Award, which she received in 2006.
Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection Phantom Pain Wings, translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi (New Directions, 2023), was a highlighted Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. Her other collections include Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), Poor Love Machine (Action Books, 2016), I’m OK, I’m Pig! (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), and All the Garbage of the World, Unite!(Action Books, 2011).
Her work has been translated into many languages, including Swedish, French, German, Polish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Danish. In 2023, Kim Hyesoon and translator Don Mee Choi gave the T.S. Eliot Memorial Reading at Harvard University’s Houghton Library.
She has received multiple literary prizes, including the Samsung Ho-Am Prize, UK Royal Society of Literature International Writer Award, Cikada Prize, Lee Hyoung-Gi Literary Award, Griffin Poetry Prize, Daesan Poetry Award, Sowol Poetry Award, and Kim Su-Yong Literary Award.
Kim Hyesoon lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, poet and translator Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), Petite Manifesto (2014), Hardly War (2016), and DMZ Colony (2020), which won the National Book Award. She has translated many poems from Korean to English, including Kim Hyesoon’s books Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), a finalist for a PEN Poetry in Translation Award; and I’m OK, I’m Pig! (2014). Choi’s translations and poetry have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Trout, the Ampersand Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Choi is a winner of the Whiting Award and of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Choi lives in Seattle.