Five Poems by Park Soran Translated by Susan K

Scallion

A bowl appeared—
a beautiful bowl I’d never seen.
Where did my old father find such a thing?
I ask. He has no answer.

It must have been used and thrown away by someone dead.
It couldn’t be this beautiful otherwise.
No one living would throw away something this beautiful.

My father ladles soup into the bowl, mixes in rice, slurps it down,
picks a grain of rice from his teeth, chews slowly, again and again.

It must be from someone dead—it must.
My father keeps spilling water, dropping his spoon as if bewitched.
Out of an ominous feeling,

I cried last night.
I thought of a rice bowl, heaped high
and someone taking it into their hands.
I thought of someone staring at it, spirit gone from their eyes,
though no one eats that rice.

I’m scared, Father. Beautiful things—
they scare me.

Like the smell of incense that fills an empty mourning house,
hard to shake off—
whose bowl is this?
I must return it—must, please, put it back where it belongs.

Thrown away, it still doesn’t disappear.
The bowl—
thrown with all my strength, it still doesn’t break.

My father
wipes the bowl clean, sets it face-down,
rises before dawn,
washes the new rice, and with shriveled hands, opens the rice cooker’s locked door.








Looking for a Dog

Everyone has a dog,
but some dogs vanish without warning, into the unknown.

That’s how they are; it’s impossible
to fully understand their world.

Some people can’t forget their lost dog, so much that they fall ill.
Some people
want to become a dog, abandoning people—only
to love a person,

for something like the soft fur, the look in their eyes
as they gaze into the distance.

They gradually begin to resemble a dog,
curling up or rising to their feet and barking, woof woof.
They cry, woof woof.
Very few people notice this behavior.

Where’s the dog? The person looking for their lost dog
stares at a flyer on a telephone pole, then paces up and down the alley, its pitch-black tongue hanging out, before slumping to the ground.
The person returns, plodding on all fours, and lies down.

I think of eternity. God exists
through nothing other than a dog.
Why do you have the face of a dog, O God? I pray
with the face of a dog.

A man holding a thin bone in his mouth comes to the kneeling person, hands clasped,
and whispers, the dog will return to the person looking for it,
one day, out of the blue, wagging its familiar long white tail, hello.

An invisible dog idly leads a person away.

Some people vanish all of a sudden.






Stairs

I climb the stairs.
A hand grabs my ankle.
An unknown hand.
It won’t let go.
It tells me these are not stairs.
I don’t believe it.
Words like, “Be careful”—
I don’t like them.
One step.
One step.
I climb the stairs.
Climbing, bound to reach—
where is it that I’m headed?
Fumbling through my thoughts,
I climb.
Cold, angular thoughts—
I climb.
My pace gradually quickens.
One step.
One step.
Where’s the hand?
Why is it silent?
I climb the stairs.
I don’t stop.
Maybe these aren’t stairs.
Maybe I’ll be the one who says it: be careful.





Ghost’s House

Every night someone keeps knocking on my door. I hear such phantom sounds.
Is this really all in my head?
They say a ghost lives in this old building,
seeking human light to ask for an urgent word. I wonder.

Aged bamboos stand in line outside the window, swaying their scrawny bodies,
peering in like a familiar scene from a horror film.
Rooms 201 and 203 are trembling in fear, bracing their pounding hearts,
barely falling asleep.
But in the end
it has come for me, for room 202!

I hesitate for a moment.
What if I suddenly throw the door open?
Boo! I might scare the ghost instead, make that empty body collapse backward,
might bring it into the room, set it by the warmest spot,
and might offer—Here, have some good tea and you won’t be lonely—
as I shake my tightly bound hair loose.

Only now do I feel at home. Now I can lie down and sleep.

Sipping the hot tea,
I suddenly fall into thought: I meant to say something, but I can’t remember.

The haggard figure in faded mourning clothes is, before I know it, nowhere to be seen.

As I open the door,
a single streak of a scream flings itself into my arms—ah, ah, so bright and warm.
Is this really all in my head?







There Was Fire

There was fire.

You used to
carry a fiercely burning piece of freshly lit, blazing fire deep in your pocket,
and slip it quietly into my hand as I waited for the bus.
It was winter, it was night.
I used it to cook a late supper, or to color in my black-and-white dreams.

We often talked about fire,
about that defenseless feeling.
Without knowing,
I would often spread my palms wide, pretending to warm them.
Like a child who, after shivering long in the cold, finally breaks into long-suppressed tears before a heater,
my face contorting, ridiculous.

I had to rush back.
It was winter, it was night.

The bus didn’t come.
My hand burned, blazing. With no choice, my fist clenched tight,
I ran.

To you, to you.

To put out a fire,
you must draw closer to it, closer still.

Park Soran was born in Seoul in 1981 and raised in Masan, on the southern coast of Korea. She graduated from the Department of Creative Writing at Dongguk University and made her literary debut in 2009 in the quarterly Munhak Sucheop. She is the author of four poetry collections, including Simjange gakkaun mal (Words Close to the Heart, Changbi, 2015), Han saramui dathin mun (A Person’s Closed Door, Changbi, 2019), and Suok (Changbi). Her honours include the Shin Dong-yeop Literary Award, the Nojak Literary Award, and the Hyundae Munhak Award. She is among the most widely read of Korean poets writing today in the lyric mode.

Susan K holds a BA in English literature and linguistics from the University of Toronto and completed both the Literature Translation and Media Translation fellowships at LTI Korea. She translates Korean literature, web comics, and film into English, with five published poetry collections — including Jang Okgwan’s Like a Fruit Tearing Its Way Out of a Flower (Dialogos, 2025) and Kim Haengsook’s Human Time (Black Ocean, 2023, co-translated). Her work has appeared in Circumference, Asymptote, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and she has received two LTI translation grants.

20 October 2026