Retrograde

The history book says girls were dragged
from their houses and tied to telephone poles

followed by unspeakable torture. What was not
unspeakable were the narrow prison closets

and forced prostitutes who bit their fingers and
drew the country’s flag in blood outside their doors.

It was unspeakable that the officers carved
Butcher on their foreheads. The girls hiding

knives in their knapsack because they would
seize back the country, gnawing the ropes of war

because they have lost but they have not given
up, and tomorrow, I pick up the paper and the front

page talks about why Korean girls use plastic surgery
and white men. The title reads, “South Korea:

The Plastic Surgery Capital.” They put their money
where their mouths—and eyes and noses—used to be.

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).