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  • Kiss, and: Time for an Unfamiliar Animal, and: At Noon, Sex Is Green, and: Room Full of a Host of Butterflies, and: Ladyhawk
  • Five Poems by Gang Jeong
    Translated by Brother Anthony (bio) and Chung Eun-Gwi (bio)

Kiss

Closing the door, you kiss me. The door is narrow but the world inside the door is wide. Entering your door, I touch your heart, and the world my tongue touches bears pictures meandering like the traces of a snake. While I muse on the next shape of humanity, rain gradually mixes blue and yellow. The scene with trees opening hidden eyes is a moment when a fairy tale I read long ago becomes real. The future does not come by a shifting of time, it is a temporary conclusion by an extinction of time, so inside your door, I compose a prophecy of the end everyone experiences. From my tongue, you try to absorb the laws of music and poetry. By you, I try to establish a prototype of beautiful breasts and a type of psychological incest. Therefore, this kiss is a contact in high-level play and strict secrecy unrelated to drug addiction. Your door is opened by my kiss and is eternally closed by my kiss. I am your last man. But for you I am the first man. Inside your door, finality is connected to the experience of extreme near-death. On your projecting teeth foregrounding an aesthetics of bloodsucking, a poetic line, “the taste of a closing coffin-lid,” had been written then erased. As I slightly draw back my tongue, an unhappy family history is drawn on it. [End Page 303]

Time for an Unfamiliar Animal

Discerning things by smell is not only a skill of four-legged    animals.Your erased smell oozes from the last breath of leaves fallen in    various directions.I interpret this very familiar trace of fecesas yet another prospect regarding humans.The reason why human beings do not stop lovingis because of a stubborn nostalgia for an already atrophied sense.

Maybe it’s because of a desire to erase people already erased from    memorythat zoos and amusement parks are so crowded on holidays.Every day my body takes a restI never fail to have pain in my heart.

If I listen to music while reading the silent nap of an animal whose    end I do not know,the chronicles of extinct species spread in the air like museum art    booksand parting is, therefore, the day I eat some meat.Biting into the flesh of things said to be inferior to human beings,striving to liberate my humanness,because someone’s heart, still alive in my body, playing the    coquette artisticallywants to touch something outside my body.

I look into the mirror after eating meat,covet the eyeballs of the mournful carnivore in the mirrorand masturbate as if turning off the last switch of earth’s    destruction. [End Page 304]

At that moment, inside my head is the gathering place of the    theories of modern physicsthat I had grasped too poetically.As hours and seconds cross boundaries freely, the narrow    bathroombecomes the battlefields of the far-off Tang and Sung dynastieswhere tens of thousands of dead men and horses attract flocks of    crows.

After I have brought up the last drop, perhaps I can go beyond    human passion.There is someone pathetically looking at this stupid concentration,trying to deconstruct the curvature of high-tech construction.Putting on another expression in an attempt to quickly conceal my    flurried mind,wrinkling my nose in a grin, my body suddenly becomes another    animal’s flesh,the prim eyes of the cat in the bedroomthat unfailingly flees my touch on days when I give off a meaty    smell.Now I realize,it’s because the more we spend time rubbing skins, the more    you become me and I become the wind, invisible to any one,    anywhere. [End Page 305]

At Noon, Sex Is Green

The woman who had been lying stretched out at full length slowly    raised herself.Her shadow dropped lower and added to...

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