‘It was the corpses of the Koreans that remained scattered in the ruins longer than any others. One reason is that although many Japanese people survived the atomic bombing, very few Koreans survived. There was nothing we could do. Crows flew down in flocks from the sky and ate the eyeballs of the Korean corpses.…

who will carry me to saihou jodo what to bring there what to wear? take me to the top of a mountain leave something behind to forget who’ll build another kogetsudai fire my body at the silvery moon? leave something behind to forget falling into orbit & spinning space who’ll throw me into ginshadan drown…

There’s a train that’s stopped moving, in the middle of Hokkaido, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. The sound of a thousand snores, a thousand sleepy sighs. The rumble of a passing train. The one the driver’s waiting for. There’s a train that’s stopped moving but any minute now it’ll…

Snow globules hanging from the trees, like silvery pollen or the larvae of worms. Rice fields smothered by six months of snow, their feeder canals obliterated, the shallow stream a black slit in the hollow. Houses dwarfed by their new snow skins, train stations drowning beneath the sky’s white tears. More snow than I have…

i was born in a silence car with only her heartbeat for a drum no ringing bells or false alarms i swam through the day’s eclipses i was born in a silence car but the sounds infected my tiny ears & the world gushed into that tiny space where first i breathed and lived i…

you never did cross it but still it remains a pair of spectacles submerged in the river on one side lies the pleasure district: neon and ribbons, arc-welded limbs the scintillation distractors on the other: some home or one light that was gutted then torn down extinguished by passionate hopes between them, one heartless bridge…

cold sweats in an immigration queue i’ve everything & nothing to declare hand trembles as it pushes a passport over the ledge into the hand of fate a process designed to inspire nervous twitches/recognisable warning signs asked for evidence of forward journey (as if mere mortality were not enough then subjected to a crotch pat-down…

soul cracked on a mountain sheet soju warms me with glacial heat mind snared on a toothless high soju shoots me up into the sky body wrapped around a sharp pin soju heals me like rain on tin fingers burnt by a solar flare soju soothes me like bomb scares eyes dimmed by the wet…

there’s another country buried here in the ground (under all this snow i can see it in these rice field rows the white shrouds make them look like the curved plane of a giwa roof as if some long-departed designer (maybe even old king sejong had seen it just this way & thought (in all…

It’s the sound of a whipcrack, (whiplash on the windswept road It’s the sound of reed engines (engine reels & carburettors It’s the sound of a small purr (purrpure lubricants that whirr It’s the sound of exploded cans (canplode diode transmissions It’s the sound of pine whispers (pinepanic at the smell of snow It’s the…