Girl paused, turned at split tongue beginning some parallelto bisect a country. From behind her, bodies of charred siblingsbarreled and passed, paving the trail aheadwith kin flesh. korea is an oxymoron, for whenhas a halving so visible been so indivisible? There is a line inside this body.There is no modern nation without the u.s.passing through it. Grandmother,spring in Baekdu Mountain must be beautiful —even the turn of the seasons will mar it.Like you, the musk deer and the black bear do not knowsome spit-up border but their own propheticqueer orbits of forage, despitethe pollutants and subterfuges. Even their reincarnations.
(the dmz) as the gender binary
Yunkyo Moon-Kim
Feature Date
- December 1, 2024
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“(the dmz) as the gender binary” from TRANSUDING: by Yunkyo Moon-Kim.
Published by Newfound in October 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Yunkyo Moon-Kim.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
“I return to Yunkyo Moon-Kim’s Transuding again and again, drawn by the promise of ruin and resuscitation, the blade of the self against the whetstone of remembering. The poems here resist the mitotic impulse of borders, the stultifying boundaries of gender, following instead ‘queer orbits’: they refract, mirror, splinter, then give way.”
—Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations
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