Emily Jungmin Yoon
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Affection
We watch the moving topography of brutality, red slopes
and orbs mapping deaths from the virus, from fire, from firearms.
It feels impossible to think red and visualize beauty and yet
red roses are splashed all around the city, so brazenly alive
that they stupefy me. People stop, pose, take pictures
of their loved ones under the mess of flowers.
I love the red beak of the rose-ringed parakeet even after I found
the threat they pose on the land I live. Affection means both fondness and disease.
Words reflect the world, which is to say nothing makes sense.
If we say only civilization can finish the world,
does it mean to complete or destroy? If we say the world might weather,
to endure or wear away?
Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the digital magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago. Yoon's second book of poems, Find Me as the Creature I Am, is forthcoming from Knopf.
Emily recommends The Bluest Nude, Ama Codjoe, Late Wife, Claudia Emerson, and Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee.