Jihyun Yun
Saga of the Nymph and the Woodcutter
Douse the black lacquered belly of the earthenware pot with rice vinegar antiseptic and scrub. Tonight, the girls squat taut on their haunches, peel open prone heads of cabbage, salting between each leaf and on it. As they stack the heads ten high so they can release their waters –un-tender and un-mild—themselves they recall their bodies as they were at the first descent: lips serrated, cutting grooves on their gums, brilliant and capable before the men came to claim them, stole their celestial robes so they couldn’t fly home. Clipped wing of the seraphim, they say, Baby you can’t stay mad forever.
Say, Stay.
Say, Stay.
On its blue shelf of night, the moon is a dunce. It doesn’t wonder why its daughters don’t return. It kills every animal that gazes too long on its light, but not the men. The girls were made wives, then mothers, bellies swelling like winter melons split from a vine. They didn’t want this life, they wanted—
And back again to the task at hand, the gimjang that must be finished before the day’s end. Now bid the oysters yawn around the shucking blade. Now pack the brined heads with chili and jjeot, the hangari is hungry. Now set the boiled pork on gilded plates before the men who laugh at the TV, frozen and golden, absorbing light like fat gods on an altar.
Ode to the Dandelion
Child of mud-pummel
and taproot, weed
and lion’s tooth,
the white clock
of your father’s seed
taught you to be ruthless.
To live, you choked out
grass and vine, stole
from the peony’s root-palm
what the rain gave;
wet promise, nourishing spoil.
Even so,
you are blameless.
To be just born
and already condemned.
We take of you what’s of use:
your sour stem chewed
to quell a midday hunger,
your bitter leaves
loaded with garlic and soy.
We take
and level the rest,
force you from soil
by the tremor
of your wrists,
smother sunlight with mulch,
vinegar and salt that spares
the lawn and poisons
only you.
Patient blossom,
forgive these hands
as they privilege other lives.
If we are the animal,
you are the day
exhausting itself.