KIM SUN-WOO

If you cross the river it’s the ghost road . . . Ancestors mine ancestors mine dead and gone ancestors mine grab my umbilical cord and hold on to it please. I touched the Yellow Springs and held on to the side of life.

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The ghosts in the stones, they rise out of the stone tied to rock. Look, moonlight shakes the ghost pole, and when the girls with their wild hair swim to us on white silk milkrope clang, clang, clang, the sound of rock breaking, look, they come cross the Western heavens between the gap of earth and sky on a tightrope over hell look they shake their torches they cry and limp they come

. . . The young girls fell to the officers, Father! Father! When the old officers would throng the door of my room, Father! I shouted, I did, and then sometimes there’d be one who’d buckle his belt back on and turn and I’d walk the black knife’s edge of sleep and when I’d wake like a roof raked by lightning, my feet would hurt . . .

. . . Go ask your mum to do that! Oh Mother, I am sorry. The day a soldier wanted me to do something so unspeakably vile, I couldn’t hold back and screamed and fought back. My teeth broke and I got bruised all over and everywhere I was bruised. I had knots like poisonous snakes in tangled thorn grass and my body was ninety thousand leagues of hell . . . and some who saw this hell settled for just fondling my breasts and leaving . . . .

. . . There was a lieutenant by the name of Yamamoto whose mother was a Joseon woman and he spoke good Korean and sang a good “Arirang” . . .

Yamamoto brought me a fork and I sharpened it. I meant to

BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 157