All Bodies Are

Hauled off
                        harried by raw earth,
            holy,
wounded,
            disrobed, both
                                                                                     him and her hard-pressed
                                                                                                                               against a rifle,
or a silver knife, hand-to-hand
            on a straw mattress, or
            a foxhole,
                                                            his and her trenches.

                                        Warpath of Banzai charge,
                         the origin of the term:
                                                    “A man would rather be
                                                                                           shattered jade
                                                    than a complete roof tile.”

All bodies befall
                                        humiliation,
                         hot stinging welts
             at the crotch, offered to an altar:

                                                             overcrowded,
             all-white,                                                                         bleached,
                                                  salted by weeping dogs.

Author of the article

E. J. Koh​ ​is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books,​ PEN America, ​and elsewhere. Koh accepted fellowships and scholarships from ​the ​American Literary Translators Association, ​the ​MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, and ​t​he Jack Straw Writers Program.​ ​She is the recipient of the 2017 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship and is co-translating Yi Won’s books When They Ruled the Earth (1996) and The Lightest Motorcycle in the World (2007).