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.