Perfect in May, All Dead in May.
📖 Grotesque Weather and Kind People_Lim Sol-ah’s Poetry Collection
Cold sentences soaked the pages.
With an eerie heart, I swallowed those sentences, one sip at a time.
Life that breaks, falls, tangles, and suffers
is painful yet ridiculous.
I delete feelings that have secretly piled up like spam emails.
Since there’s no welcome destination, the trash bin suits them.
Would a kind person peek into the crumpled heart in the trash bin?
I wondered if I would truly be grateful, but
as expected, not yet.
📝 Thoughts and Sentences I Loved
pg.10
Today, I was abundant.
I read the spam email to the very end.
**
Clinging tenaciously beneath the railing,
I watched the water droplet to the very end.
I cheered for it to fall.
**
How many leaves are on the ivy I’m growing?
I counted for the first time. The numbers tangled along the ivy, and I
felt as if I was being deceived.
**
The seeker wondered about the hidden child,
and the hidden child wondered about the seeker.
I ache with curiosity.
**
Like the scribbles written on a cast,
pain was popular with sentences.
**
pg27
Flowers poured forth in May, and all laughed in May.
Flowers were perfect in May, and all died in May.
**
**
pg.66
Like a bird quietly still in the air, like the fact that that bird was desperately flying. There are grains of sand that know a landscape that seems to be in place is actually breaking apart with all its might.
pg.73
“It’s so sweet,” she muttered,
like Mom, who spread moldy jam on toast and ate it.
“It’s perfectly fine,” she muttered,
like Mom, who chugged expired milk.
Every time the words “I want to die” surged up,
I scooped rice and put it in my mouth.
**
Mom must have also grabbed the rice paddle, just like me.
As soon as she opened her eyes, Mom must have had to find the rice paddle every day.
**
pg.85
I turn back at the corner.
“Who is it? Why are you following me?” “I was worried about you on the night road.” It stares intently at me. My secret, unknown to me, clings to my toes. My secret, unknown to me, suddenly grows. It begins to impersonate me.
**
We sit in the park for a moment, looking at the slide.
The bright side of the slide is empty. The dark side of the slide is hidden.
pg.94
The whole family sat around.
Family members took turns supporting its head.
Watching the young dog die,
**
“Goodbye, Kkamji.” “Don’t tell him to go, he can hear you.”
“You go to bed first, you have to go to work.” “We’ll wait together. Together.”
**
“Wait for what?”
“We’re going to close his eyes.” “Take your hand away, he can’t breathe.” “He’s dead.”
While the beloved life took its last breath,
we were sufficiently ridiculous,
**
We put the dog’s body in a tomato box
and moved it to the entrance, saying we should put it somewhere cold.
The family members huddled together and tried to sleep.
**
pg.113
I become a metal handle.
A cold substance approaches a slightly colder substance.
If you hold something cold for a long time, you can meet your own body temperature, now warmed.