[One Sip of a Book] "I Want to Taxidermy You"... 'What Do You Want to Do With Me?'

Choi Jaewon 'What Do You Want to Do With Me?'

It is a poem in the form of “unfolding or folding without hesitation.” It ranges from short poems ending in three lines to prose poems as long as 50 manuscript pages. It is praised for boldly breaking away from the traditional frameworks of poetry while possessing the energy to charge toward the core of poetry. Not only metaphysical language containing theory and abstraction but also swear words, dialects, and online chat messages frequently appear.

The ground beneath is full of corpses

If only I hadn’t walked looking at the ground

I wouldn’t have noticed

I neither want to eat with you nor sleep with you. I want to taxidermize you. Not that kind of taxidermy with chemical treatment, no intestines, eyes turned into black beads, but the very surface of you, the very surface that can hold your most distant place, leaving nothing of the surface behind, neither breath, life, nor even intestines. I want to save only you from the flow of time. It is close to taxidermy but not taxidermy. It is a guarantee of some kind of trembling, your freedom to stand in front of the mirror all day, your freedom to endlessly fall into yourself, the power to endlessly consume yourself.

Sour words that I could hardly translate

Dragging long nails, wandering on the blackboard at night

Inside my body, a hundred children

Are noisily talking

But I cannot live even one of them

In naked silence

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