LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Curtain* scrap
by Kim Yideum
October 18, 2016
Author Bio 작가 소개
Kim Yideum
Being born or dying, either or both might be a revenge on a person, sent from somewhere far far away.**
You part your lips. Like a fly landing on broken glass, you lick my curtain and your pants get wet. You, a fish swimming between my lips, forget your lines like a doll and tremble when the curtain goes up. Finally you’re torn apart by my tongue, controlled by my whispers.
Perhaps you’ve fallen in love with me as if you’ve been targeted for revenge from far far away. O my actor, you hold my face, mesmerized, as if it were a prologue, a script. Your expression looks innocent, as if all you are doing is licking off my lipgloss. How deep are you falling? Our eyelids close as we kiss…
A farmer covers his potato and garlic fields with plastic. Transparent plastic, semitransparent plastic, imported pink plastic. I’ll pay your daily wage after you finish covering everything. I puncture holes in the plastic so that the dirt and sprouts can breathe. The land is barren. It might rain. The farmer hugs me, and with his garlicsmelling snout, he…
When I left the darkened rice mill, the mak was gone. Some woman was crying. The audience was alone and the stars twinkled teasingly. The wind blew out of nowhere and the dressing room was as tiny as a toilet, so we kissed in the men’s room. O babypink lipgloss couldn’t protect my lips, O my bra couldn’t stop your lips, neither could my silky stockings… Fuck, what will I cover myself with?
We’re only alive while dying. We lick each other as if we’re trying to kill each other. Will we become chaste if we wipe ourselves afterward? Do we want to? Love is a revenge that comes from somewhere far far away. Let’s take out our contacts and lift our veils. We’ll entangle innocently. Ah, I want to, but I need more plastic. I’ll design a city with as many condom machines as coffee machines. There’s a curtain between us, so we won’t dream of transcendence. Instead we’ll be swallowed up. Since we’ll be wearing condoms, we’ll be earnestly consumed. I love you and I love this amazing disaster.
Translated by Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson
Reprinted with permission from Action Books, Indiana, US.
* The original title 막 (mak) has multiple meanings: eyelids, film, curtain, and hymen.
** The epigraph is taken from the prologue of a play called Sea and Parasol by Masataka Matsuda.
Writer 필자 소개
Kim Yideum
Did you enjoy this article? 별점
Did you enjoy this article? Please rate your experience
