Catcalling

Lee Soho, So J. Lee

• Publisher: Open Letter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781948830386
• eBook ISBN: 9781948830478
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Lee Soho's debut collection of poems is an experimental lyric bildungsroman that confronts dynamics of abuse as it challenges poetic form. Catcalling exposes and ridicules the violences that the speaker-protagonist Kyungjin encounters as she navigates a patriarchal world. Divided in to five formally distinct sections—ranging from lyric to prose poems to experimental mash-ups to concrete forms—the book begins in Kyungjin's childhood home as she recounts the haunting claustrophobia of verbal and psychological abuse, and follows her into the world as an emerging female poet navigating pervasive sexism in the era of Korea's own movement against sexual violence and the global #MeToo movement.Lee's poetry is reactive: reacting to a series of foils, but also initiating a kind of chemical reaction that introduces something radically new to a world that has such confining gender and artistic expectations for a young poet. Following in the footsteps of feminist Korean poets like Kim Hyesoon, Kim Yideum, and Choi Seung-ja, who have made their way to English audiences in recent years, Lee Soho emphatically heralds the arrival of the next generation.

PART 1

KYUNGJIN’S HOME

COHABITATION

I was born but somehow you were born too. From one to two. We crumple ourselves into the cramped stroller.

We use the same uniform, man, room.

Unni, the doctor says I should do whatever I want. So Unni, I’m not going to call you Unni anymore. Because I love you, I’m going to call you by your name. Let’s be real, you don’t deserve to be called a big sister, my little sister says, peeling the apple with a knife. It’s the last apple, so you better finish it. Little sister points the knife at me as she peels the apple. Crunchcrunch I eat the apple.

I slit little sister’s wrist for her. Mom says you slept inside her like it was your grave. I slit little sister’s wrist again. Hush little baby. You’re prettiest when you sleep. I put her to sleep on her stomach. I put her to sleep, pulling the blanket to the top of her head. How cramped how cramped the night is. From one to two. From one to two.

DAY WITHOUT REDUCTION

At night I thought of day

I thought of the moth dead inside the fluorescent lamp

A faint and faraway life

Before the innumerable 0 we

count the corpses of the monkfish lying diagonally, discarded on our dining table

I carve out the eye of the souring monkfish We make a broth with all the right and wrong doings of the monkfish and drink it up for dinner We spread them wide open and dig around and

close them I

debone the moldy monkfish and eat its tender flesh In the kitchen Mom removes the skin and dresses me in it I become a bag and a bank account

and a husband too Mom holds my hand only after putting on rubber gloves on top of cotton gloves

Finish your food You should eat the bones too Mom opens my mouth and feeds me her teat to wash it all down I spill a mouthful of milk and wear my milk-splashed panties and shove my milk-splashed finger down my throat What floatfloats unswallowed is my

tongue

Mom weeps like a roll of toilet paper

I thought about Mom

and the spoonfuls of monkfish

I thought about the day without any

reduction

Without fail

at night I thought of day

At the table we recalled

growing kinder in unfamiliar places

FEARING THE GAZE OF STRANGERS WE [ … ] EACH OTHER^*

* November 21, 2014: the day Sijin beat me with a frying pan. As a result of those strikes I had the strange experience of briefly seeing double.

A CHURCH WE ERECT TOGETHER

We went to the island

Father always prayed

He slept with a sister at the broken church and

donned his pulpit robe over his already committed sins and

bestowed a blessing upon us

In the name of Sunday, Father forgave

his own secret

Following His will, we brought our hands together and thought about roofless secrets

We enjoyed eating dead animals on the rooftop after prayer

Halal, in the name of Allah,

we thought about the IUD loop inside the sister’s uterus

We hung a loop even around the sound of her breaths

We could not keep our promise

to protect everything we hung a loop around

Mom and I clipped our fingernails short Flicking misclippings here and there while like a folktale Father’s thing turned into a rat as big as a

forearm Night was day and day was shrouded by night and Father squeaked quietly under the covers He believed Squeaksqueak When I lay in the lower bunk Father shook the bed from up top When Father was shaken the church was shaken Verse of the day Squeaksqueak No one carried the cross yet sins were committed

The spangled sins shone even in darkness

I sharpened charcoal and wrote Father’s secret I sharpened the words that are visible here but invisible there I stabbed Mom with them

Invisible lights shone like spoken words

KYUNGJIN’S HOME
— A STUDIO APARTMENT

My lover wears old sweats with baggy knees and with even baggier knees I crawl on the floor and cry like spilled milk My thirtieth year like beer I’ve popped one bottle more than him so when I hold the night in my mouth like a dick it dwindles and when I blow it becomes infinite and when I cry yet again I become a woman Like a woman I become the shadow of an offspring The offspring sticks to the callus of my heels and sucks on me and screeches like a goddamn bird My lover sucked me off then said my poems suck Said he heard them and they’re

disgusting

I rewrite my fully grown lover as Husband

So I’m telling you Husband

You should die when you’re old

If you’re lucky, you might die of old age

A fistful of Husband frozen hard in the fridge I try pounding Husband’s cheeks against the sink I bang him on the floor

Why haven’t we changed at all?

Because you keep taking bites out of me you bitch

Stop shoving food in your big fat mouth

or stop yapping

Lies

It’s because you bastard

keep chomping away at me and everything else in this apartment

I cut and sell my hair to buy Husband’s mouth Husband pokes through the plastic bag and bites my calf No matter how he attacks me I

curl my spine while Husband’s teeth force my head down Since

his mouth was left open Husband uses it to say my poems

suck To say he’s heard them and they’re

disgusting I’m chewchewed out like squid while

the bitch

in my stead pops another beer at my husband

KYUNGJIN’S HOME
— MAY 8, PARENTS’ DAY

That day it rained like Grandma and

Grandma who tied and cut off her breasts with Dad’s tie became Grandpa and Grandpa

put on the wedding dress cut from a rain poncho and simply waited for Dad to come

Whether that day brought peaceful death or agonized life

Mom waited for Dad and Dad shaved every head in the family and offered our hair on the ancestral table It needs to be an odd number but we’re two two four What do we do? Dad picked up some woman off the street and shaved her head and sat her down at our table Now we’ve all gathered here As Father’s Father had become before us we became baldies with the open mind of bodhisat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Part 1: Kyungjin’s Home
• Part 2: The Birth of the Most Personal and Universal Kyungjin
• Part 3: The Island Back Then
• Part 4: Kyungjinmuseum of Modern Art
• Part 5: Archive for 31 Versions of Lee Kyungjin