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Romance #1

Eunsong Kim

like some 14 year old girl waiting for her crush to glance back i

keep waiting for capitalism to end

but it won’t end

my adult life lover states

on what will end:

Libraries

Birds

Retirement

Recess

Sprinting during recess

Hispid Hares

Starfish shaped like stars

Inconvenience

Wrinkles

Sunken cheeks

Living corals

Protests

Anti-Nuclear Proliferation

Non-Aggression Pacts

Dragonflies

Mangosteen

DMZs

Trade Embargos

Leopards, all kinds

Sawfins

Rewilding

Infiltration Plot/Dreams

Oak, Trees.

Partulina Variabilis

Partulina Splendida

(-------) Violence Prevention Programs

News. News:

Might a few jellyfish survive—

counting till revelations becomes part of—

Eunsong Kim is the author of gospel of regicide (Noemi Press, 2017) and the co-translator, with Sung Gi Kim, of Kim Eon Hee’s Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? (Noemi Press, 2019).

Themes

About this Poem

“I’ve been writing and adding to this poem for several years now. The poem is part challenge and provocation, part tribute and elegy to how life and extinction continue to be fantasized. It is titled ‘Romance #1’ because romance is an all-encompassing venture: all the emotions, all the body. '#1' because this is only the first part, yes? This cannot be the ending. Yes?”

—Eunsong Kim

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More by this poet

On Endings & Longing

You spend too much time watching detective television. You like procedurals because it feels like ideal work: there is movement and there is predictability. The formulas go as such: One, the detective is a smart, elusively attractive thirty-something year old with attachment issues. Two, the serial killer and/or one-off criminal becomes their fixation. Three, evidence is gathered, presented, refuted, and reorganized so that four, the criminal can be caught, incarcerated. You understand after some time that the only way the episode/program will conclude is if the criminal is captured.

Eunsong Kim

2020

In English for Clarity

The remnants I no longer believe the words that float inside without the pretension of release Father your loneliness this empty church is my answer my mother All that is destroyed is my love don’t ask don’t repeat tell me I treasure the copies with original envy with majesty reserved for a tourist this way when I say help you cannot pretend to misunderstand you cannot turn to the other two in a different language and respond simply with How still you feel How closely this resembles love. Father even violence can be redeemed this way. When enclosed in this much solitude.

Eunsong Kim

2017

[asian]

asian

—alienate

& mystify

feels like

but has never been yours speech that could be a poem

if written by you:

conduit for reserved for

for whom does your body make easy

—american.

Eunsong Kim

2017

Poems

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Romance #1

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