LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Two Poems by Lee Young Ju scrap
by Lee Young Ju
Translated by Jae Kim
June 9, 2023
Literary Composition
Going through, with a person, a tunnel in the night. A person I didn’t know but thought might be my teacher. A person I dragged with me, a person wearing a heavy backpack, our hands cold with sweat.
The hike never ends. The person’s heavy, a world shoved into the backpack is hot. A burning smell from somewhere. I see my teacher for the first time. A shining face, marred, must mean we’re buddies. How we, while, by, breaking, love; how we speak.
A person litters pieces of themselves towards me, though I don’t have a world to call my teacher anymore.
Shrapnel lodged into my waist. Hoping for a good scar. My hands are feeling the air, searching for where the pain starts. A person smiles faintly in the tunnel and shakes my hand, the one they were holding already. Look, they whisper, literature was our mistake, but living beings are complex and we lack the scripts to write them down anyway.
There are numerous tunnels on the continent. Going through a tunnel to school day after day has changed my face somehow to a rat’s. A subway train out of commission, a creased plaid shirt, a destroyed chain link fence, a blind abandoned dog, one long hot wire, apparently connected, a notebook whose name has been erased.
I still pass through, holding on to the handrail. I pass through the endless space.
A person stands by me. Teacher, could it be my continent is the notebook that will soon be burned? Is it the white rat’s fate to crawl all the way while fumbling for the shrapnel that continues to burrow?
A person has fallen silent. Lowers their backpack. I stand on the handrail with no one else and stare at the infinite ground. The familiar dark. A dark packed dense. Carefully open the backpack. I came close but managed not to be friends with the person. We aren’t friends but
Those that shine in the abyss. In the backpack are white bandages.
A Trip to the Grasslands
if what I need to prove myself is the strength needed to endure the pain of being whipped I have enough the story of digging up the black mud from the grasslands the story of being buried in a hole in the grasslands you promised you wouldn’t write such poems anymore a white utterance a mutterance no one talks about me I’m happy it’s calm here and your insides are cooking a family can grow or shrink a white animal cries thin and long next to a fire everyone grabs a tong hears it cry tries to get in front shoving shoulders having stopped in my tracks upon witnessing two people being torn apart from love I’m happy people who don’t know each other drink hot-hot tea and try calling someone they don’t know Grandma white leather’s starting to smell good the tent’s burning from within how do I relate to anything from beside a burning storage unit the leather’s being peeled off the grandma who doesn’t know where she’s vacationing you’re pouring blood into a bucket everyone drags other people by the face to eat before they do they fall into the bucket and flap their arms around a family is meant to suffer damage over time you have become a crimson bucket you roll on the ground I’m on a corner of the tent happy to be while my family grew into the thickness of night I slept alone in a barn with my backpack a whipped white animal in the grasslands falls you fall and I see your face and think it might be mine and feel your forehead the sun’s brilliance the whip is dyed gold and the white animal we said we wouldn’t anymore write such poems I had hoped for a warm corner I was there everywhere in my dream the person closest to me picked up a knife and cried stabbed the back of my hand said crying do you think farm animals are food the white animal is next to the storage unit out of breath I said no more poems like this no one speaks no one can speak cry as you might the trip won’t end the grasslands are beyond vast the backpack has been turned inside out has been dug
by Lee Young-ju
Translated by Jae Kim
Writer 필자 소개
Lee Young Ju
Translator 번역가 소개
Jae Kim
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