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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA impale an officer I couldn’t stand with it, and die with him, but it didn’t go well. I got dragged off and beaten till my back burst . . .Yamamoto’s “Arirang” sang in my mouth like a red bird, it did . . . . . . the Korean soldiers who’d been forced into service got us things like aspirin and on the medicine we’d forget that our legs were sore and that we were getting torn up down there . . . and sometimes we’d get assigned to troops on islands without women on sputtering little boats and if you get sent, it’s ten days . . . Parao . . . injection number 606, the baby prevention injection, And if you told them it was really hard they’d give you a single sleeping pill each time, they did. I was fourteen . . . (and so this is an old story), 4 The girl who dances swallows a peak of firewine. At the end of the ghost pole she hangs a ghostcatcher cloth full of blood and pus, look, the river of redblack petals trickling from the edge of her mouth. Look, the bits of flesh that have managed to survive insult, that have no memory of the blinding furrows. Catch this ghost naked. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost. Catch it. The war started about a year after we went to Pa-ra-o. After that there were twenty, thirty, men a day. On weekends the soldiers formed long lines didn’t even have time to take their clothes off took their belts off left them next to gun barrels and they’d unbutton their pants . . . . . . Both thighs burst and trickled bloody pus. The medic came and swabbed out the wounds and put some gauze on them . . . 158 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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KIM SUN-WOO Recon planes. Fighter planes. Air raid. Recon planes. Fighter planes. Air raid . . . Moonless nights when we’d get caught in an air raid on our way to an island we’d wait quiet as the dead with the boat engines off, bullets fire-raining down into the empty sea, and in the morning the ocean would be foaming crimson red . . . Some of the older girls were hurt below and fought back, refusing to surrender their bodies and got dragged off to a cave, shot in the groin and breasts chopped off . . . Mieko and Yoshiko, names two older girls went by, died in those days . . . . . . after I turned nineteen the bombing grew even worse. You’d go to sleep and there would be a high-ranking Japanese officer who had committed suicide. EvenYamamoto who had been kind to us, he pushed the hilt of his sword in the ground, fell on it and died even the soldiers who’d pounced on us died in the morning died in the night. It was near the war’s end. 5 The chilly moon rises over bare feet marked with the innumerable cuts of knives.You come to me splitting the linen you waver, dance on the water mud on the small of your back, mud that flew here long ago and piled up a river of mud. The wildflowers are in full bloom. They have pushed through the red, red scales of the water, they ring bronze bells, the girls who tread light so light at the stern of the soul boat. Look, the gate of the moon opens, it swallows the rocks heavy with sin, and the ones in the rocks cry out, look, it’s like a snake has swallowed the white moon. Look, between heaven and earth, hell grows hot. Heaven upon heaven sobs between the legs of the girls. The basket you wove with your nakedness with nothing to hide, BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 159

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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA

impale an officer I couldn’t stand with it, and die with him, but it didn’t go well. I got dragged off and beaten till my back burst . . .Yamamoto’s “Arirang” sang in my mouth like a red bird, it did . . .

. . . the Korean soldiers who’d been forced into service got us things like aspirin and on the medicine we’d forget that our legs were sore and that we were getting torn up down there . . . and sometimes we’d get assigned to troops on islands without women on sputtering little boats and if you get sent, it’s ten days . . .

Parao . . . injection number 606, the baby prevention injection, And if you told them it was really hard they’d give you a single sleeping pill each time, they did. I was fourteen . . . (and so this is an old story),

4

The girl who dances swallows a peak of firewine. At the end of the ghost pole she hangs a ghostcatcher cloth full of blood and pus, look, the river of redblack petals trickling from the edge of her mouth. Look, the bits of flesh that have managed to survive insult, that have no memory of the blinding furrows. Catch this ghost naked. Ghost. Ghost. Ghost. Catch it.

The war started about a year after we went to Pa-ra-o. After that there were twenty, thirty, men a day. On weekends the soldiers formed long lines didn’t even have time to take their clothes off took their belts off left them next to gun barrels and they’d unbutton their pants . . .

. . . Both thighs burst and trickled bloody pus. The medic came and swabbed out the wounds and put some gauze on them . . .

158 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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