Pigeons

Led by a soldier at four o’ clock in the morning,
we rode a train that stopped at a military tent.

Twenty soldiers returning from the battlefield, drunk with knives, entered my tent.

I was eighteen when I lost my womb.
The smaller girls cried, Mommy, Mommy, it hurts!

The medics left us.
But the wounded soldiers needed morphine.

They grabbed my clothes, and cried, Sister, Sister, please give me a shot!

I was sorry for them.
I injected their bodies and they fell asleep.

Before they died, the soldiers said,
My wife, my mother, let’s meet again at that shrine.

After the war ended,
I visited that famous shrine but there was nothing, only white pigeons.

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).