First published in Korean in Modern Literature



The midday sun shines brilliantly.

A bird enters the sun.

Broken blade.
The heat is buzzing.

Like greasy meat in a microwave oven,

crackle crackle crackle, we were expanding.

A breeze blows past the sweat beads on the bridge of my nose.
Feet are soaked in the pure white sand.

Like dipping your hand into a rice pot, they go in easily at first, but soon they

encounter a hardened wall.

The gap disappeared.
A person stuck in the sand.

The sand is heavy and the sand slopes are stubborn.

Not a single error.

The sands are bound together.

Pulling each other.
Don’t struggle in the sand.

You’ll continue to sink.
Sand makes things that are less weighty than itself float.

It absorbs things that are heavier.

Pulling down, down.
The sand on your back is like a map of Latin America.
Fine sand stacks at the border of the sea and the white sand beach.

Darkness creeps and spreads like fine sand your toes dig into.
A crescent moon like fingernail marks on vinyl flooring.

A ring tossed on the sandy beach.
Even though no one is lying on my right side,

I still sleep on my right side.

Sometimes, when I lie on my left side and curl up,-

I feel a palm gently pulling on my right shoulder.
That’s what memory is,

the body leaning to the side where no one is.
Two people’s breathing mixed together sounds like waves.
If my body is the deep sea,

my heart is like a beer can sinking into it.

The deeper it sinks, the more it shrinks and flattens,

flattening into a flat iron plate.
Heavy and slow waves.

The rocking won’t go away.