LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Two Poems by Song Huiji scrap
Translated by
Megan Sungyoon
September 7, 2026
How to Make Crop Circles
I thought when I grew up I would live a truly lewd life of a hedonist, dripping in the pleasure of anal sex fucking a different man every night banging four, five strangers until my body shattered in pieces until I ran out of breath until I tested positive and died as the universe had me
believe
What I’m picturing is Gyu’s face his wavy body hair resembling a wheat field his dry lips that often chafed when not wearing lip balm his hands and feet soaked in heat and sweat, that dampness used to take me to a certain swamp, an eco-park, a swarm, of deep round black eyes I used to encounter amid the blades of water grass
Even at the time we walked in the Keondae district and joked if we held hands here all these passers-by would do a double take, the lighting the colors here would all turn into iridescent gunshots, even at the time we looked over at the beach from that Gangneung cafe where waves prey on waves, bite off and swallow each other, a phenomenon that continues that is ceaseless and the toes of our shoes kissed to brave off the chills,
Knowing all these could be condensed into duchang [pox] or ddonggochung [fag]
What is it, this thing called beauty, Gyu pondered as I sat next to him
Starting a fire in quiet, the call of a thrush, the scent of wet grass, the impoverished hand of darkness grasping us, a day of recalling such things keeps
me as a sharecropper, in my palm is the sharp blade that severed the ancient god’s testicles, the tool that’s long been used to harvest the heads of crops, yet somehow useless in my hand, the old-fashioned
life
playing on-screen
like a glacier under the sun
like curdling milk;
the endlessly
expansive
field
Sitting in a cafe by a window framing the aftermath of the flood, I’m waiting for Gyu who is stubbornly unarriving, I sing him, reenact him, peel the skin of my future with him, layer by layer, then in a blink
a paper cut, blood drips drips drips and pools, breaks ripples upon ripples, I
do not moan, I do not look away, as that is my share, only that much is my
all
Memory Étude
In first grade, I wrote this under “dream” in the class anthology—poet.
In second grade, I discovered it in a rice paddy—an abandoned duck carcass eaten to the bare bones. There I whispered to myself. Here you were.
I thought I recovered it.
In third grade, I wrote my first story. In a lined notebook with a teddy bear on its lime green cover—titled “A Dreaming Bear.”
In fourth grade, by observing red tulips planted in a line along the school flowerbed, I wrote a quintain and wanted to get slapped in the face out of nowhere. I wanted to confess my sins and beg. Until full bloom.
In fifth grade, as I witnessed a dark, crooked bone protruding from my body, being alive became as bizarre to me as the Bully a Plant experiment.*
Every time I opened my mouth
It spewed out dry leaves. A whole slew. An invitation. Thanks to which I realized the existence of my garden in the deepest corner of myself.
Here you were.
I thought I recovered it.
In sixth grade, I promised myself to become a healthy homosexual.
* There’s a pair of sprouted onions. One is a positive-word onion. The other is a negative-word onion. To the positive-word onion you only say positive words; to the negative-word onion you only say negative words. The experiment was based on the premise that negative words would have negative impacts on plants’ growth, but at the end of every experiment it was always the negative-word onion that had grown creepily lush.
Translator 번역가 소개
Megan Sungyoon
Megan Sungyoon translates between languages and across genres. The English translator of The Cheapest France in Town by Seo Jung Hak (World Poetry, 2023), Sungyoon has published in She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Reader (Wendy’s Subway, 2024), FENCE, Asymptote, SAND Journal, The Margins, and Columbia Journal, among others.
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