Wellness Meals
Today I held funeral services three times.
For breakfast, I ate bread and salad.
After eating up the bodies of the wheat and broccoli,
I squeezed the living flesh of an orange and drank it.
For lunch, I ate rice with roasted-mackerel.
I filled up on the squashed bodies
Of blue fish, seaweed, rice, and cockle.
For dinner, I ate pork belly and drank soju,
Wrapping kimchi in some crackling pork rinds.
The sobriety of this death ritual was further embellished
By the burning of tobacco incense
In the funeral hangout near my office.
Reading the delicious records of life,
I inserted my body into the gap between soft carcasses.
Joyfully and tediously,
I arrived here.
Jeong Han-yong: poet, born in 1958, poetry 『How to Make a Mink Coat』 etc.
Translated by Seth Feldman(Canada, b. 1977) is a teacher, writer and musician
