Kilmok Volume 8 Excerpts
Motherland
Posterboy
Eligible Bastard
Untitled
The Distant Heart
Motherland
Oh, my mother, my mother,
What is happening to you?
Your child, what am I to do,
Who lives life as another.
Your child spoiled all through the year
Faces a predicament.
Essence of establishment
Spiraling down; oh, so near.
Unspoil your child, my mother;
Teach you child to struggle forth
To exemplify his real worth.
Oh, my mother, my mother!
- Myoung-Ae
Posterboy
For one teeth numbing, ear ringing
dizzy, drunken moment
You were mine, or was I yours?
A figment of childish, girlhood dreams
of the 8x10 poster
Glossy and perfect; and you were there.
Recite Madame Bovary to me, again
for I understood it;
I believe you understood it, too!
Tell me all about your ethnicity
and teach me the connection
You and I are supposed to have.
Use your elderly wisdom to take
away my naivete,
But I prefer to keep my innocence.
And PLEASE! do not attempt sincerity
for independence is divine
And I enjoy the long walk home
Broken and short, complexity rules supreme
because during summer
The poster falls, for humidity doesn't adhere.
- Jessica Ko
Eligible Bastard
I would like to kiss your neck, your face
My right hand like a glancing flicker [from the eye to the shoulder]
You're gold. And like curls curl into me. I know when a dream is called a dream
far from the simplicity found by fags in bathroom stalls. Bizarre night clubs at last call.
They're free to choose, still
Well, curse everything off a straight beaten path.
Nothing is sweeter than this. Then, the image of the measure of worship is in the distance.
Your father, mother, Volkswagen, Saab. Soccer practice and proms with mutual funds.
A frill dress on a May Sunday morn.
The first worlds have seconds and thirds. This passport is blue and feathered.
Somehow bloodlines trickled here and I was born. And everything got fucked. That isn't it.
The only fucking going on here.
And give your boys little china girls to eradicate the race.
Call them Amy Tan, "Mai Lin," or whatever suits their tastes.
This equation is often reversed on another plane.
Catalogues and magazines are reminders of the distance between living and existing.
Living is advertised in the color of honey. And so, little Mai Lin has got freckles for a fetish.
The brilliant point in every night sky has belonged all along. The guiding star that bilks guides
just to the distance. Making shadows against the wall. There, find four more walls.
Her eyes, sore from the fire fed figures. I would douse it with the Pacific if it would raise the
hope that the hope
would be risen. If in the hope I have somehow blackened that shill's star. The eyes washed
out, the fire quenched.
And perhaps now is the time to join a profession in which for every kyke there is a dago
equally emetic.
And I will forget about this obsession and be a coward, a racist, instead. For an end.
Everyone seeks their ends. I seek an end.
- Mu Sun Yishi & Kyunju Yishi
Untitled
Candles clutter the bookshelves in a ragged litany of order among the noble bindings of Plato and Machiavelli and Kant. Callous and brightly colored, these little wax towers sit precariously on the corners of my rosewood table, weighting down my attempts to make a gutter piece of literature. The papers are wrinkled and dappled with coffee spots. Too many adjectives. I guess I'll clear the table soon.
Little puddles of wax freezone on the table, sometimes forming in my late-night haziness an odd design of circus colors. I sip my coffee slowly and watch the baby-flames tango as the wax grows soft and glossy, dripping down the candle waist. My mind feels claustrophobic, and I blank at dotty, random intervals. The candle shrinks.
So this is the dream I had last night:
His face was literally a taunting madman in the heart of this tiny, box-like room. I needed
to leave. I needed to breathe something fresher than the smoke that pressed itself sweetly
on the linings of my throat. He came closer. The music pulsed inside my head, and I think the
room swum to some strange cyclical motion I couldn't stop. He smiled an inch and threw me a
raised brow, asking how I felt. How I feel?! I screamed. And the bed leaped up in my
face as the walls crouched to embrace me. He chuckled lightly. The sound came toward me,
then pulled back, then ended up in my ear, and I sat up with a start as his glasses swelled like
balloons. Then jaggedly, he turned toward the window and stuck a match to light the flock of
candles on the sill. I will love you until the tears from these candles stop falling. The
words floated toward me, a growing recollection of a friend who quotes poetry. The
baby-flames cascaded along the dripping lines of wax and danced brightly in the puddles
oozing on the sill. Fire began to spread like a contagion, and the candles shrunk as he brushed
a hand to my shoulder, leaning closer and closer, wrapping my mouth over his. Then I woke
up.
I descend the staircase into a quiet maze of books, rationalizing as always about what I ought to have done and what I should do when I get up first thing in the morning. The cash registers chime behind me, and I stride around corners. There is a musty, old feeling to this place, and sometime I think it really makes me fidget. I can smell the sights that fold between pages, an ancient odor like the dankness of autumn, heavy with soil and the rusting of leaves. There are no windows, no wispy dust beams, no natural corners of light and dark. People stand in awkward spaces, and I watch their fingers link on book titles, as if they were eyelids or the base of a neck.
It was about a month after I had that dream that I found his face in that bookstore. He was leaning against a shelf with his nose in a book, and I stared at his small wire-rim glasses. When he looked up at the growing weight of my eyes, I could feel time begin to slip and then freeze, as if the contagion of fire had knocked my head empty of all reason.
"Hello." My voice wavered.
He was reading a thin, nondescript-looking novel. New fiction, no doubt.
My glazed-over eyes pierced fixedly at him as he carefully slid the novel back in its place. I swelled with expectation. Please...Please. The sterile ceiling illuminating our faces no longer seemed to matter so much, and I think it was at that moment that I let him look inside me.
He smiled and held out his hands.
"Hello."
Our fingers mingled for a second or two before he dropped the touch and turned abruptly. Then he walked away.
My eyes grew round and dry as his backside faded around the corner. I blinked twice
before I realize what he had carried away with him.
- Laura Kim
The Distant Heart
At anytime the tyrant, Distance, drives us apart,
On a sheaf of paper, I bring my crate of restless
dreams to share.
You, with a doe's soft and tender heart,
Always bend your ear closer with loving care.
Whenever the ominous shadows cause me strife,
I befriend the worn, dusty album to feel your
presence more.
For you have brought the soft touch of butterflies into my life.
That not even an angel has done before.
That arid desert, Loneliness, that sucks me dry,
Makes the second hand of my days crawl like a snail.
But knowing that we live under the same sky,
And will embrace once more, I and my dreams prevail.
The long stretch of earth that yawns between us could
cause our love to sink in lime,
But I know that our fated love weaves our paths
together for all time.
- Jeff Lim