• Forthcoming in Vestiges_06: Aporia

    A rift tears apart the ripped, pouring out
    The never named that let slip from their throng
    A hand to come forth and load a revolver’s
    Chambers aiming at a heaving heart books
    Mention no longer. An off-season hart
    Hunting long gone out of fashion, the ashen music
    From farther room is a ripped cassette
    Mixtape with no machine to play it. A ripped art,
    Souls reaped all night. Rippers play
    Guitars in the dark. Make choppers scream over
    Green hills. Or hells? I have no time to bleed
    When predators are invisible. A double negative
    Is an erasure back to square one
    On the cadence hitherto ripped from sources
    Once well-known. This bleeding heart pierced
    With chambers of a mansion expanding like a tree
    With deep roots spilling all over
    The life it pumps till a lump sum of what’s owed
    Is reached. Crisp leaves of its incandescent tree
    Dancing in the air like ballerinas moving
    To a forgotten score of locusts
    Plunging and raiding a granary by the swan lake
    And expiring. So when the bullet ends
    All that came apart from the heart’s beating,
    The chambers merge into a house of one room
    Where a mote in lover’s burning eyes
    Turned on the waterworks that extinguished fire,
    Autumnal leaves covering up the Flood.
    The chambers of my lover’s revolver
    Spin like the revolving door of a thunder-infested
    Skyscraper’s lobby numberless floors down
    From the muzzle-shaped lightning rod—
    And the people are getting shot
    Up through the elevator shaft disintegrating
    In a blinding flash, leaping into another
    Dimension, leaving behind fumes.
    All my lover needs to do is shoot. Shoot!
    A revolver begs a game of roulette
    And the bullet in the chamber is a live
    One you forgot was coming in hot
    Letting you know God’s temple is
    The bull’s eye in the sky.
    We who are shot
    Up are not sleeping in the Sun,
    And ashes are mistaken for sun motes
    Until the night arrives with the Moon,
    And the goddess of the Moon’s brilliant bow
    Has a string in tension but no arrow
    That we can see to endure it,
    That we cannot see even at the snap of release—
    But she never misses, leaving invaded shores
    With the dead for carrion, Thor’s hammer
    Swinging violently beside his pulsing thigh
    Until energy expires and peace can slip
    Into the ballot box. Only the losers
    Remember who spilled what blood when.
    They will ask where the lightning people went.
    Point toward the firmament
    Beyond the thunderclouds, the other half of waters
    Divided from waters and see there
    A reflection of someone at a departing gate
    Making this world the last country they are from
    After their own image.
    Between hammer swings is the last country
    I am from. The pendulum descends nearing
    My heaving heart, but I will refuse to give up
    My army’s movements. I will not say
    Where my last country is because I refuse
    To have a country, nor will I be refugee,
    A refuse thrown out of hardliner’s harbors.
    See how I am broke
    From breaking the multiverses shoring
    These fragments against my ruins. See, I was told
    Shattering my mirror’s frozen surface
    Was the key to my freedom. That in fact
    The me-inside-the-mirror was the one
    Who was free because the mirror is a made
    Thing and the natural history forbids
    A perfect reflection of any kind. And he never
    Made the mirror, it was mine.
    Now all I have is a stump for a hand
    And hundreds of shards of other worlds
    Where the pieces of the me-inside-the-mirror
    Laugh with me in a bloody festival,
    All the worlds burning from geography
    And trade. I trade away my last country’s
    Passport for this kaleidoscope.
    And I must remain uncertain and afraid.
    I have never held a gun in my life.
    I have never pulled
    A bowstring. I’d sooner make a harp
    Out of any good bough of a tree
    You give me to use as weapon, and pluck taut
    Strings shining in their straight lines of light,
    And each note will be an arrow
    Flying out from the snap of my release. May I
    Be given the voice to say the words long lost!
    Had my pen not turned into smoke
    At the sight of you, O goddess of the Moon,
    None of the words would have been lost—
    Snarling Artemis, this is advanced Tetris.
    The goal of the game is erasure.

    Perfect lines disappear without a trace.
    No matter how many worlds come and go
    They remain a shadow of this place.
    In the cosmic microwave background glow
    All I see is a Rorschach of a disfigured face
    I take to be yet another mirror show.
    No-new-life-forms-on-my-way-here is the case
    Of this world that I cannot claim to know
    And remain silent for all time or else
    Flowers will not blossom at the end of the bough
    Given to me to make a bow with my hair
    As its bowstring if I am ever to be allowed
    To let my hair stay long, O goddess—
    It has been so long since I called on you
    And now the smoke-show memory of her who I
    Gave your title to is long gone and endless
    Distances of desire was too much
    For longing to contain but you remain still
    As I shatter mirrors of many worlds
    And piece them together to find
    The closest distance between any two only to see
    My reflection looking back at me
    And here is your crown of flowers
    Made from a bough I bent inside out
    Till it was a circle and all the arrows got
    Shot into the frontal lobe.

    A projectile speeding out of metal
    Tube from a chamber of my heart’s mansion,
    The violent gas from torched mixture
    Of potassium nitrate and charcoal and sulfur,
    This listless powder, giving murderous power
    To leave behind a trail of broken flowers—
    But O what did I spit out?
    The goddess is dead before I can say
    That she was just a name. And the dream
    I dreamed was the dream of harnessing
    The power turning all that hate into useless
    Love and removing from the equation
    Any objectified material from becoming
    The necessary data to feel the yearning
    Giving birth only to imitations of desire again
    And again but is the source of all creation.
    And no matter how many dimensions I make
    The shadow of my landlord creeps into view,
    And under that shadow is a swamp
    Pulling me into its black water
    Though I thought an ogre would be too big to drown
    There I met a soldier of a kingdom that died
    Many deaths long ago and he bowed
    Toward the Capital where now only
    Grass grows despite being salted
    And after finishing his incantations
    Of legends fables and humanity
    Stubbornly repeating dead words to death
    Calling and calling hoping to raise
    The guardians of the borderless kingdom and
    The burning city he turned to me and asked are you
    Also from a country that no longer exists
    To which I said yes and have you seen—
    And he said o you are here for that too
    Here look at all the numbers undone
    Was the sigh full sore for you too
    Was the hart saying noli me tangere
    For Caesar’s I am did the poor girl
    Fall in love with a god resurrected
    To rule the kingdom for a thousand years
    I have tried to hold the wind with my fishnet
    In my latest dream and as soon as he said this
    I woke up with a smell of ash everywhere
    And it was the coldest winter
    The city I lived in had faced in its history
    Morning news said a child had frozen
    And in the ice were the leaves
    They were building new skyscrapers
    Though there was still more land
    Enough for me to stand while I bow

     

    Notes

       John Milton, Paradise Lost.
       Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell), Duino Elegies: “The First Elegy.”
       Yi Sang, “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15.”
       Zbigniew Herbert (trans. Bogdana and John Carptenter), “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.”
       Seamus Heaney, “North.”
       Jin Yi-jung (진이정), “For the Upside-down Dream 4” (거꾸로선 꿈을 위하여 4).

       And others.

     

    Jack Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), the winner of the 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. His poems and translations have been published in POETRY, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, BOMB, and elsewhere. He teaches at Davidson College.

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