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Tributaries: Kyo Lee + i cut my tongue on a broken country
On this first day of National Poetry Month, Kyo Lee, the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award shares her poem “You step out of the coin karaoke” from her debut book i cut my tongue on a broken country (Arsenal Pulp Press). Kyo chats with us about her collection—”Asian diasporas, girlhood, queerhood”—and recommends a poem from Avery Lake’s Horrible Dance (Brick Books).
Read “You step out of the coin karaoke”
from i cut my tongue on a broken country
You step out of the coin karaoke
into the Dongdaemun streets where throbbing
lights & technicolour dreams flood the sidewalks
sweep you up in their current.
Everything temporary & edible:
tanghulu strawberries, neon signs, karaoke
bar girls in rhinestone dresses
tugging at your wrists to stay.
You’re getting tipsy on the noise
& the pull of what you can’t have
anymore. All the bright things:
street lights, headlights, cigarettes,
people’s eyes—they could make a small sun
of their own. Think about the strangers
bustling around you, guess
their favourite fruits & phobias.
Feel the chill of the violet glow
from the thousand open signs swimming
on your skin, how it makes you feel sexy.
You’re thinking that youth is green in colour.
The city has been saturated
since the last time you walked here
with your mother, eating tornado potatoes
& not thinking about anything at all
& smiling & smiling & smiling.
You’re thinking about your mother.
You imagine her a year younger than you are
walking in front of you in a denim skirt
& breezy steps. On her way to a tteokbokki place
she’s thinking that the moon is bright tonight
almost like an artificial sun.
She’s thinking of her dead father.
She’s thinking about the boy who looks damn good
in Calvin Klein jeans. (He is not your father.)
She’s trying not to think about her mother
squatting in the moonless alley the next street over
tainted with that cold violet glow & soiled money.
She’s thinking that youth is the colour green.
She’s not thinking about you.
She’s not thinking about how she’ll comb your hair
while telling you stories
about the Dongdaemun streets. She’s not thinking
about buying the watermelon
you said you were craving yesterday.
She’s not thinking about you climbing out
of the window to get lost in the neon night.
No, she’s not thinking about you at all
when she giggles with her friends about the love note
she left in that boy’s gym shoes
& steps into the coin karaoke.
An interview with poet Kyo Lee
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “You step out of the coin karaoke,” and how is it representative of your collection?
Kyo Lee: I started writing the book at 14 years old. It took the form of three different books (all of which were terrible) before it became i cut my tongue on a broken country. It’s about Asian diasporas, girlhood, queerhood, and the need to grapple with such identities while growing up. It’s about the universal hopefulness and sorrow associated with coming-of-age. It’s also about sliced rabbits, making out in churches, peaches, and the end of the world.
“You step out of the coin karaoke,” or at least the start of it, was written in Columbus, Ohio. It’s representative of the collection in its attempt to humanize one’s loved ones, which is particularly hard to do for one’s parents. The poem is an attempt to see a mother as more than a mother but also a child, friend, lover, etc. The collection offers glimpses into these moments of realization, like those in “You step out of the coin karaoke,” where you realize that your parents have lives outside of being your parents. The poem also represents the collection’s focus on familial inheritance. Hunger, grief, the eyes, the associations with the colour green—what lovely and disastrous things are passed down through generations?
ALU: What drew you to poetry? What do you most value about poetry?
KL: The ability to start and finish a poem in one sitting. The ability to start writing without knowing where the story starts, and the ability to end, either knowing or not knowing where the story ends. This, I suppose, speaks to the ability to throw the reader into the middle of the story without setting it up. I appreciate that the responsibility of figuring out where you are in the story falls on the reader. Maybe it’s because it makes my life easier. But I find it an enjoyable experience as a reader of poetry as well.
ALU: What non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) do you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?
KL: Ren Hang’s photos of people in lotus ponds. I don’t know if I get to call it a “sister city” to my poems, but I would sure like to. Hang’s photos are grotesquely beautiful, in ways I would like my own poems to be. Flowers growing out of mouths, bodies hidden behind leaves, nude figures mingling with nature—the emotion is not palpable through the faces but through the image itself. In Hang’s photos, there is the repeating imagery of lotus flowers, greenery, moonlight, and nude bodies that also appear in my poems, as well as the suggestion of the erotic and sensual as it exists coldly, beautiful and unloved.
Kyo recommends…
“Family/History” from Avery Lake’s
Horrible Dance (Brick Books)
ALU: Why did you choose Avery Lake‘s poem “Family/History” from her collection Horrible Dance? What do you love most about this particular poem?
KL: From the starting line “You’re not dead if I remember you hurting me,” the poem shatters your world. In this poem, there is also the idea of familial inheritance found in “You step out of the coin karaoke,” and perhaps the unfortunate inheriting of what we do not wish to inherit. It eliminates the warmth associated with inheritance and replaces it with a crudeness: “Inheritance law as expressed by meat / Kneeling to paint, to flatten. / A family’s murderous disconnect. / Power is successive, like water, or paving over water.” It strangles my heart—what more could I ask for?
Family/History
1.
You’re not dead if I remember you hurting me.
I hope summer breaks your back.
You drape your voice around the house.
I sit in the swelter, reading, rocking.
You say, “Don’t, it might bring the house down.”
2.
The still-living river flooded my grandmother’s basement.
We painted the floors and walls a blaring white.
Told myself kneeling, “Poetry is stupid and selfish.
I write when I want to look like I’m using my hands.”
Forget the words, not the teeth, wet and deflating.
In this house we are our function.
Inheritance law as expressed by meat.
Kneeling to paint, to flatten.
A family’s murderous disconnect.
Power is successive, like water, or paving over water.
I gouge myself from the world.
Detachment and profit as the only white memory.
The river, breathing, pooled on the carpet despite us.
We painted our house so it hurt the eyes.
On my knees I know what my parents are.
I can see where the body becomes a body.
3.
A house is a slim wall against the storm.
Oh summer so sickly.
I’m crawling back to the language again.
Oh amygdala.
It’s oozing in, thru the floor & the ceiling.
Oh the poems are scabbing.
A bedroom is a slim wall against a family.
Your father won’t clean up the mess.
You left your shame in the living room.
Like a storm, but like the rain, only gentle, like dripping water.
Oh the names I could tell.
A house is a slim wall dripping blood.
Oh in Montreal they’re cool.
A door is a penetrable thing.
We burned the old city down.
Oh old man is big oh new man loves old man.
Oh old man is bad oh new man hates old man.
Oh old man is gone oh new man is big.
Oh let the blood guide you.
Oh I’m losing you again.
Oh here it comes, up through my insides – but gently, in droplets.
4.
When my grandmother dies, I’ll cough up coal.
I’ll hate myself for having blocked her number.
She said this would happen. “I’m getting old,
it’s not as though I’ll be around forever.”
I’ll lie down all day, eating guilt and rot.
Hide at the funeral like a mob boss,
back to the wall, expecting a gunshot.
Christ, what a heavy, jagged thing I lost.
When she dies, I’ll walk into the river.
Stand in the current a while, the freezing
flailing waves against me. I will give her
my body, bloodless, beaten, and heaving.
It’d be nice to shake for a reason that’s not
my body remembering things I forgot.
* * *
Kyo Lee (she/her) is a queer Korean Canadian high school student living in Waterloo, Ontario. She is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Nimrod, The Forge Literary Magazine, and This Magazine, among others. She loves summer storms and sweet peaches.
* * *
Thanks to Kyo for answering our questions, and to Arsenal Pulp Press for the text of “You step out of the coin karaoke” from i cut my tongue on a broken country, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Brick Books for the text of “Family/History” from Avery Lake’s Horrible Dance.
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
