I swallowed fire / And forgot you were an ocean.

Flowers will slip from a torn veil.

When a man cries / he floods himself in salt tears / and colorfast he drowns

What does he have to fear?

I proceeded with caution / Like a marble inching toward the line

silence sullen-faced fate reaches my ears

Three or four days / he hangs out in our house.

How does one grasp making / sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch?

Like a fish / in an aquarium, you are a source of distress and distraction.

In the mind, a flock of birds, feathers from an unshakable, shadowy thing.

What / are the things we need to prepare?

Upsidedownistan here.

I don’t understand how we walk around the world / ​as if there were a single way for each of us

On waking, I see my body has been rearranged.

“Pillow” is a poem by 2019 Poems in Translation Contest winner Lee Young-ju, translated into English by Jae Kim.Listen to Lee Young-ju read her poem “Pillow” in the original Korean.…

it’s awful of me to interrupt, but I just / need you to understand how certain kinds of wounds can be useful.

There's no cloth hawker in the bazaar / willing to make dirty deals

On a mattress / amidst an armful of hair / a beautiful woman tosses and turns

Their wailing won’t let me sleep, won’t let me sleep . . .

my body, / like a spoon, here on this earth, sweetly scoops out / my brain.

right in the center, / sat the completely empty dharma throne, / richly decorated, the heart’s dream waiting / like a balloon floating through desire

I see your unfamiliar riverbank / and walk toward you.

I dare not use mortal eyes to contemplate you

If I had a spare season, I would’ve rushed to whisper vulgar words

Death is colder than a cup of water on my body, and/ Fonder to me than sand

Its scent is like infirmity, / This soul

my pact with hope is evergreen: / immense this green that makes a heart.

and now my eyes are knives slicing the night to / split the mist

She tattoos the wavering future / on the bare skinned wall.

Tell the sad stories to the sky.

What kind of home is it / where no one dares say / our son’s name

He squinted at me, swaying in the wind. Blood or soil, he asked.

I say change is always painful, / someone has to be the first.

I want to reside in the hard and permanent / so I construct a suite of poems and a man to live inside

The slumber at the edge/ of my well of fever

Because death is stronger than hunger

I would like/ in a faraway language/ to tell you what I don’t/ understand

She tells me not to be / a holy land / or a mine of tenderness

The father’s house is a living language/ Open to guests passing through

This particular Tartar is unbeatable at cards/ Except for whist (not a game for Tartars)

A Black man is always somebody's Black man.

Time, lord of the hours / reigns sovereign

a chair standing by itself on a highway / means its life is over

Dissonant music lingers in the bodiless ear of the present tense

We have found in the deterioration of flesh and bones a spiritual liberation

Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced

Who can escape his own charisma

I know there is the curse of god and the curse of being human

We left toys with wilted smiles on the beds

It had rained, / The lilacs were rejoicing.

no disputes / chroniclers and chronicled as one / reunification, yes, reunification

The light retires to the lamp / and suddenly all is dark again

Soaking in time he sees fallen Estoril

Contemplating a family heirloom, a ruminative Amarjit Chandan finds the past staring back at him.

Morning starts / when lights turn green.

I will not accept this old age / grafted slyly on my body.

I can’t stand that one the way someone with a chronic sinus infection can’t stand abnormal shifts in weather.

you’ve no idea what it means to stand in a sausage line!

The pawn shop, where we sold your rings, / was shuttered.

I hope and despair at the same moment