Terrance Owens
Poetry
Terrance Owens has had poems appear in PANK, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, and Lake Effect, among others. He lives in Seoul, South Korea.
외국인
I’ve been a decade in Seoul
and still struggle with the language.
Sometimes, squeezed into the tilted corner
of a busy gopchang shop
between the fired grill, a dozen people I don’t understand,
and greasy tiled walls with hard water stains
inching up like ivy,
I think maybe if I just
let the language happen to me
I’ll just know it–
the way a boy rests an open textbook on his head
to absorb its content.
So I close my eyes and
follow each spoken phrase down its drawn-out fuse,
let clusters of consonants detached
from any meaning
blast me back to basic being,
to muck and bone
in the swirl of all things
before the sizzle of words,
the smoke of intonation.
When I open my eyes,
an ajumma is taking her kitchen break
on a short-ledged bench in the back.
The back of her head is against the wall.
She is using her fist to knock
the arthritis out her knee.
The chatter is just chatter to her, too.
“ Not being able to speak the native language of a world you call home is mostly frustrating for everyone involved. But every now and then, it provides little moments of clarity/perspective that language would have gotten in the way of. ”