ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
E. J. Koh is the author of memoir The Magical Language of Others and poetry collection A Lesser Love. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Recipient of Prairie Schooner's Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, she accepted fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Kundiman, the MacDowell Colony, and others.
Doom
A man who drinks between my long white columns
tastes history: the first time I touched my breasts,
then changed into an ocean from a dam —
my belly a sculptor of people, fed by the milk-springs
of my mountains. The smell of coins mixed with something
sweet like corn, metallic savory of the hard youth I lived,
washing my stained underwear in a bucket on the street,
hanging them on lines that rocked over my head — a nursery.
The coloring both lightest pink and hardest rose, freckled
where women of my family have freckles. The shade matching
the sort of my lips. When my mouth is dry, I too am
elsewhere. How about the shape — the suckle, the cinch, the prissy,
pretentious and shy until held by the eyes? Soft
as the bottom of fruit, bruises — hairs like the hairs inside a bite
of mango. A man who places his ear on me hears the roar
of his blood surging through him. His tongue speaks
until my own speaks the same cooing language.
We must enact what it means to live off one another.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
