Words like a Pimple

📖 Innocence and Soboro_Im Jieun Poetry Collection

It was a poetry collection I was drawn to because of its title.

Innocence and Soboro, really?

At first, they seemed completely unrelated,

yet they also felt like words that resembled each other.

The poet’s stolen words had no taste.

I boiled the cold words vigorously and took a sip.

Their still innocent, tasteless quality suited winter quite well.

📝 Thoughts and Sentences I Loved

Poet’s Note

I’m sorry, such words were like a broken cup

I don’t like it, words spoken with a frown were flat like a plate

Cheer up, pimple-like words hurt when pressed

It’ll be fine,

I crumpled obvious words like a paper cup

**

Perhaps if we were polishing a plate

we would have broken the most precious thing

pg.33

Words are too light to steal, and I grow smaller and smaller. Barely putting a single blank space in my pocket, I leave the reading room. At every turn, question marks block my way. Why does my mouth itch more the more I remain silent? How can one touch another’s sentences?

pg.59

My husband, home from work, goes to separate recyclables

I drag a large box and follow him

I haven’t folded away my wide, elongated heart

**

Back home, on expired bread

I sprinkle sugar and coat it with egg

The words I want to say are burning black on the frying pan

I flip one side of the evening

**

Like a box containing time,

we sit side by side and watch a comedy

Why aren’t you watching baseball today?

My husband says it’s because it’s his heart

**

I keep forgetting that my husband has a heart

I want to hold his heart like a glove

so I can catch it wherever it’s thrown

**

You know, Wednesday shakes the window

**

My husband fell asleep, having skipped dinner

**

Without turning on the light, I go to the refrigerator

and take out kindness to eat

Kindness is cold

It’s soft

And of all things, it tastes like tangerine

pg.82

<The Reason It’s Vintage>

When I tell you why sadness is vintage

you say it sounds like a foreign city name

that in foreign lands, even sadness can become a muffler

and if you wrap it around your neck in deep winter

a polar bear might even come looking, out of envy

**

If we could cultivate sadness instead of hiding it

the snow piled on the windowsill

the forest completely covered in snow

with that nearly white warmth

we would have caressed each other

**

We sit facing each other, like polar bears with itchy backs

and talk about vintage

It’s sad because winter is melting

It’s sad because I can’t meet the dog I raised

Old things are rapidly disappearing

pg.108

In summer, when trickling sweat dries up again

the child follows the rotating fan

If you cling close to the fan and call out the past

the past is segmented into paaaaaast, easy to detach

pg.117

Are you okay? you asked obliquely

I said, Bell Pepper

Hmm, so I said, ‘a bell pepper is a bell pepper’

You said you wanted to smoke

I just wanted to eat a bell pepper

We could have gone to buy bell peppers together

In the middle of the night, the vegetable store was closed

and we could have gone to do something naughty

**

Why is the bell pepper still so blunt?

As if I’m a woman and you’re my first

As if you’re winter and I’m clumsy

We wanted to stop being like this and become something else

When I pronounced “pi,” you said “mang,”

when I pronounced “nun,” you answered “sseop,”

It didn’t become tears

We embraced each other’s shoulders, trying not to flow down

pg.124

I swallowed what I had to say. What should I do?

The doctor, who was prescribing digestive medicine, said

Warm your body

**

I changed buses and went to the orthopedic clinic

Doctor, please straighten me out

though it might not be my spine that’s crooked

**

Yesterday, while wondering what to eat at the restaurant

I ended up eating my worries

The psychotherapist used the expression “excessively metaphorical”

**

When I arrive at an unfamiliar emergency room and open my eyes

on the cot are

people who have escaped their hearts

and people who have chewed and swallowed their hearts like candy

pg.139

I become an adult by cutting out and drawing in my mother

**

Returning to a home without my mother

I try on my mother’s old winter coat

**

I am still the same, but the coat has become a little small

My mother has become a little small

pg.143

One might retort that if that were all, wouldn’t it be surrendering the entire act of reading poetry to an extreme relativism that converges almost on meaninglessness, and what then would be the point of reading poetry?

But couldn’t we think differently? Doesn’t the fact that something different stands out and is felt each time one reads a poem prove not the relativity of poetic truth, but rather that all different truths can be unearthed depending on who reads it, when, and where? In this context, poetic truth would be a medium that allows us to contemplate something we hadn’t noticed in the time we are reading/living, within our own specificities.