Pumpkin or Dating a Shallow Guy in Korea

This night is our first date my

up-to-ears-beard and reindeer jersey are

very handsome and in your winter boots

you look more like a distant rocky mountain than

a monk who threw on my long coat  - but nonetheless

it is very cute.

It's winter so I say; take a chance with a

silty bathhouse on the edge of the brine.  

We are washing in separate baths but

sleeping in the same room by night.

Our heads on wooden pillows and

on the ground we sleep just with our

body's bones, our flesh is soft and young.

Drunken men and women come

inside from under the hard black sky to sleep

one old woman pulls the sleeping block 
out from under your head

makes it sound like a ripe and seed-filled

pumpkin hitting the floor.

I tell you, pumpkin is an ugly woman in South Korea,

and you’ve even heard of an ugly woman

but I do not understand your call to

register the shock.

It's not a matter of feminism.

Baby fat if they're just right, I might say

flower-piglet, but an ugly woman, if she's just growing in

long orange lines under the sun.

Yeah. You found me down on the farm.

Even she’ll admit to this. This is what you

fail to grab, even she will admit to this.

But it is not you, don’t worry, and I don’t have a small face,

so until now it is a can-of-pumpkin-soup-girl who

looked at me in the nightclubs. I do not like a big face.

I want to be a model, but in Korea it’s not attractive,

this face-of-the-big.

To cut down on the bones of your face is

a possibility and if I save money, I might manage 
to move arms to surgery.

So, sleeping here with you on the planks and

your head bouncing against the wood

I am grateful to hear the brevity of its thump. 

English --- 한글 한글 --- English

English into 한글

We eat small fish with button eyes from plastic mass graves but to bite them is so satisfying especially hearing the tiny bones pop between your gorgeous white teeth. The way you use chopsticks to harpoon candied potatoes, your symmetric lips deftly consuming pickled walnut. I envy the way your heart munches deeply.

In the evening we kiss and your mouth has bloomed into a sour flower but I don't mind. You call me Flower-Piglet and when you do I call you Tiger and see us both flying over the city like two little super-animals on Tiger Pig adventures.

You are always full of rice because you eat rice and you love rice and your skin feels like rice when we hug, our bodies mould together and we are a bread yin and a rice yang and although traditionally Korean people don't eat bread you are more than hungry to have me.

Sleeping, you dream of a field of red cabbages. I am in the long dry lines between the rows wearing wooden sandals and talking with your mother who speaks to me in circles and squares, which I use to cut and gather spicy leaves into urns.

But when you wake I have brown eyes and you still call your own eyes black even though that is impossible and when I cook rice it just doesn’t seem to hold. And, you speak quietly in Korean when you call your mother. And, you say shhh, when your father calls.

한글 into English

We enjoy the ocean’s yield in the same container, small fish with a slim eye beaded through their skull, seeing themselves in salty bunches. You enviously try to lasso wild rice from the bowl and watch my brave teeth doing natural things.

We kiss and your lips are fluent with sugar, it is nice but salt is an important part of any meal. I call you Flower-Piglet because I do not call you all the time, even when you call me Tiger.  You say we are two super small animals like pigs flying over the city to see our way into the evening and I say which city, piglet? Where? 

We should always be filled with rice; cooking it and eating meals together, and rice is important before we die, too. We hug and your skin is learning to love rice, or, at least starting to star the healthy map of rice. Traditionally, Korean people don’t eat bread, but there are now many patisseries in larger cities, and I am not sure about this.

In sleep, I dream of the red cabbage fields, discarded urns, and you cutting my mother’s spicy talk and hanging it obviously on a long drying line between the rows of vegetables. You bend down to supplant the cabbages with small strawberry plants. 

In the morning I still have black eyes, but when you wake up it seems impossible to you. And when my family call, you curl into the bed sheets like a Flower-Piglet resting in the hay and sleep. My 꽃 돼지.

Bitter Heart - New Version

Bitter Heart

That night, time had a bitter little heart

You against the cool river bank me in the grass 

rustling round you


You caught a koura in your hands it warmed and crinkled 

a fresh lantern lighting up the valleys of water

I called you a kind of rural magician an aquatic metaphysician pulling 

crunchy life from soft matter and although you laughed you said

the night is giving me a hard time with its slow arm its 

fast arm

and so I caught your crying legs and cradled you vastly

*

We walked back to the house and your bed was dense with tiny
sad ghosts

last winters mice ricketed in soft crooks of skin and

spring lamb bleated wetly at our finger tips

a swarm of lost bees burned darkly between us

*

Outside the red-eared moon curled again and

nipped at its own thin tail,

dreamed of becoming fat on small edible things like us.

*

Later the river carried the koura downstream to perform amongst

the slick pool of eels while 

we worked hard to resuscitate the day but

Time has a bitter little heart.