Giving up, a Man in Seattle EJ Koh Poetry

local_library Giving up, a Man in Seattle

by EJ Koh

Published in Issue No. 206 ~ July, 2014

I would rather steer a song into flowers

than repeat what I saw: your breath pawing

 

and your lips fastened together, the incredible

beginning of the woman across you.

 

You flare up at the shoulders. You are a bulldog.

You are spoken for. You are inside the advent

 

and I am all but an adoption of a joke. I am a hoodie,

I am awake for dinner and possibly for the burnt fashion

 

of jealousy towing in, leaning towards the ends

of what is acceptable. It is a trap.

 

account_box More About

EJ Koh is a poet, translator of Korean poetry, and author of experimental novel Red (Collective Presse, 2013). Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, La Petite Zine, Narrative Magazine, Columbia Review, among others. She has work forthcoming in The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics from Black Ocean Press (ed. Andrew Ridker Black Ocean, 2014). She has been featured in Time Out New York, GalleyCat, KoreAm Journal, and FlavorWire’s 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York and was awarded a Kundiman Fellowship for Poetry and The MacDowell Colony Fellowship in New Hampshire. She blogs at thisisEJKoh.com.