Mid-night, swinging upside down on a pull-up bar, the girl says, Mother, this bone growing on my back, white in the night, protruding out of my skin, long and endlessly this bone, like a ladder it shoots up in the air, whenever hot wind sweeps past, whenever blind birds drop by, whenever suspicious air weaves in and out of this bone, the pain is unbearable, let me down from the pull-up bar, let me down and saw it off, it grows thicker each night, this, this, it renders white light whiter, anemic, before I become a grave for the bone, please, cut it off, quickly, in my body black bones clatter, joint by joint fluids are drying, it chose my back as its host, before the grains of light pile on and split the grave in half, before putrid craters start to multiply, before this bone drags my emptied body to the back of the sun, let me down from the pull-up bar, saw it off, Mother, please, a crescent moon is lodged in a girl’s back, a flat bone will grow into a round and bright celestial body, the girl upside down on a pull-up bar will vanish into the moon, and they say that, once the moon gobbles them up, girls leave behind black bones filling every inch of the night sky,
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“A Girl and the Moon” is excerpted from Cold Candies by Lee Young-Ju, translated by Jae Kim. Reprinted with permission of Black Ocean.
