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.