gojoseon, korea is rape (unedited prose)

written to Denny Zeitlin's new album, 'Panoply,' inspired by 'Good Detective' k-drama

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

조선

korea is a rape survivor
trying to be small,
keeping to herself,
not saying what she wants to say,
afraid and ashamed, a figment
of everyone else’s imagination,
and just a little bit angry,
fighting the voices inside
telling her to go and die,
or rise the fuck up
and raise hell

we’re not like you,
japan, with your mighty samurai: clean in the beginning, hiding many ills
china’s stark extremes court us, our name derived from hardship and military might

our dramas, our written history, the dialogue we tell ourselves at market — dirty with american army stew — never quite tell the story, for we are raped and hunted, stuffed down in onggi, like kim chee that is never allowed to touch the sun,
but blooms anyway,
in spite

we speak in shorthand…riddles and gibberish, purposely lost in translation, inspired by whatever catches the beggar and the king’s eye, this beur cinema theater of the absurd, trying to be profound, trying to be everything we are not

we play with fire, in scorched rice detail, folding, bending, tweaking your euro-anglo-lizard time — o. henry style — without giving ourselves away

our faces as even and placid and perhaps a little ugly-angry-cry as the tal we wear to hide the shame — ancestral, legendary — the kind that spits on a hot pan, walks the wrong way on a one-way street, casually knocking over the ashes of your estranged brother, cutting ourselves open before an international incident

selectively revelatory in
what we do, where we put our hands, how much or how little
we eat

rich man, poor man, beggar, king

many banchan
many names
for we learned as we crawled
many states of being
the reflexive measure
of a child raising an arm
to take the blow, so
you don’t see me

don’t see me

be calm
be the wall
he cannot break,

we clang like bottle rockets, messy and loud,
as you recoil in disgust and horror, jennifer,
with your espresso judgments,
and your bragging, colonial pidgen,
we invade your holy, protestant, childless space
with our pagan mothball gods

we slap and punch our show of love
you think is abuse, a micro-aggression,
(rainman)
a miracle in holding onto
anything good that’s left after
the soldiers zip up, wander drunkenly past secret black market
trinket shops,
where savvy poppy
counts her ticket out