Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers

By Travis Nichols

Summer has come slowly to Seattle, but it was fully present last weekend. The audience at Gallery 1412–there to hear Don Mee Choi read her translations of the South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon–arrived sun-dazed and pink-cheeked, with swimming hair, flip flops, and (in my case) ice cream.
We shuffled into the dark makeshift gallery—a rickety retail space taken over by artists— where an old cassette tape recorder had been placed on a folding chair in the middle of the stage. Without much fuss or introduction, Don Mee walked up to the tape recorder, pressed play, and then sat back down as Kim Hyesoon’s voice came hissing out of the speakers.

Though most of the audience I talked with afterwards didn’t understand Korean, we all sat mesmerized as Kim spoke in her native tongue. (The gallery is often used for improvised and experimental music performance, so it wasn’t hard for the regular audience to listen attentively to sounds without striving to make sense). After a few minutes, Don Mee stopped the tape and stepped up to the microphone. She read some of her translations, including the first one in her book Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers, “The Road to Kimp’o Landfill”:
Cut my hair short again
I don’t want to pull out
the names etched onto my hair that grows daily
As rain fell, garbage bins from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th floor
must have been turned upside down
Hair fell profusely
I kissed in a place where garbage came down like rain
I kissed where I vomited all night long
Every time I sang, vomit flew in
I turned the garbage bins upside down in my room
and had morning sickness, then had a smoke
My poetry books burned
Three hundred million babies were born
One hundred million of the young and the old died
The day I took the pills
I walked out the gate in the middle of my bath
Black plastic bags flew higher than a flock of sparrows
The discarded sewing machine was like the head of a horse
The sound of Mother’s sewing machine
filled the holes in my body one by one
I tore off my swollen breasts and tossed them
beneath Mother’s foot on the pedal
A forest gave off a foul smell, carried contagious diseases
It burned of fever during the night
A busboy at brightly lit Motel Rose
threw out millions of sperm every night
From the forest, mosquitoes swarmed
and dug into my scrawny caved-in chest
Born in the 20th century, I was on my way
to do die in the 21st century
After reading a handful of other poems, Don Mee played her recording of Kim Hyesoon again, then she answered a few questions about the poet’s life and work. The crowd applauded politely and, after a little awkward silence, stumbled back out into the sunlight.

2008-07-07

Posted in Group Blog, Live Readings on Monday, July 7th, 2008 by Travis Nichols.