Two Poems from "Cold Candies" by Lee Young-Ju
Lee Young-Ju, transl. Jae Kim | Cold Candies | Black Ocean | 2021 | 96 Pages
The System of Growth
A plant nobody planted grows in the window across from mine on the fourth floor. The old man who lives inside scratches his bruised back, oblivious to the fact. Pulls the blanket over the crown of his head. Having witnessed the secret to growth, insignificant me falls to the bottom of a cliff. Why would I fall and fall toward a peace that the world cannot understand? Sap drops from the outstretched fingers of a green leaf. The blood of a plant, the blood of a nightmare, that someone will leave, that everyone will leave…
When the monsoon ends, the nightmare grows taller. This sense of isolation that a person feels when he’s so insignificant that no one bothers to plant him—he’s a blanket, muffling his cries inside his window. We face each other at night, bleeding white, and fall into the insignificant gap. When the roofs are rocked and the windows are cracked, the night speaks. Or tries to. Is it thanks to our silent labor that we shine? This secret labor whose demands haven’t been met…
Letters in the Letter Burn Toward the Sun
A white frog sits on a rock. A dream of eating a frog sliced in half with a dagger. The bed creaks when I roll over. I tend to vomit paper, and letters of a certain font lie on the floor, face down. I must escape this room. I drift toward the old terrace to read the letter my dead friend sent me. Each letter in the letters I read at the Moroccan beach move on to a merrier place and beckon to me. Sister, you must be worried about me, but I’m happy here. You’d like it here, too.
Cheap nylon is easy to set on fire. The peddler suffered a burn to her face while wearing a scarf made cheaply in India. The residents of the beach return at the end of the rainy season with rickshaws. I cough sparks, and a murder of crows is swept like sand out of the tropical forest. A red marble rolls into the mouth of a black dog—what a happy funeral.
Used with permission of Black Ocean.
© 2021 Lee Young-Ju.
Lee Young-Ju is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has received support from the Arts Council of Korea and the Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture. She is also an essayist and a playwright. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
Jae Kim is a fiction writer and a literary translator. He received his BA from Princeton University and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he’s currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he translates contemporary South Korean poetry by women, alongside early twentieth-century works from Korean and Japanese.