(the dmz) as the gender binary

Yunkyo Moon-Kim

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.

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Headshot of Yunkyo Moon-Kim

Yunkyo Moon-Kim is a Korean poet and education worker residing between mountains and seas. Newfound published their debut chapbook, Transuding, in 2024.

Cover of Transuding

Austin, Texas

“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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