Work — Saehee Cho

The Crane Wife (in print, Spanish, trans. by Ángel Valenzuela)

She is barely discernable from the color of snow except for the lick of red pressed against her skull. It looks as if someone has blessed her. Her body is shuddering, making soft breaks in an otherwise expansive stillness. The beak is half buried, weakly trying to toss off the cold. There is nothing in this place, a hollowed field of unbearably placid white. Even his own presence is barely
marked, pressing only lightly against the snow. There is only her labored breath, the unmeasured rise and collapse of a feathered chest, a sudden impulsive twitch in the blade of a bent wing, itsboning limp and destroyed. He picks her up, massages the wing back into place. She is warm where she is broken.

....

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The Crane Wife (in print, Spanish, trans. by Ángel Valenzuela)

Valerie Hammond, "Touch," 2011 (pigment, color pencil, wax on paper)

"one.

A barely sagged face, the bud of fatigue.
And also beauty, clean and silver skinned, a cut."

Valerie Hammond, "Touch," 2011 (pigment, color pencil, wax on paper)

“Delicate Exploration” by Jeana Sohn

"My doctor came once a week to treat bedsores. He was slight, anchored by his leather medicine bag. It was the medicine bag that I first noticed about him. Pockets and spaces for things that seemed too antiquated for modern medicine–amber vials with rubber tipped droppers, magnifying glasses, cloth bandages. The bag always slightly agape but never fully opened, a sliver opening into another world. My father did all the talking and then would seat himself in the corner of the room, his body bent forward and angled towards mine. There was always coffee resting tenuously on his knee. It stayed untouched. The steam dead in the cup."

Business Trip

"She presses up so close that she can feel the cold of the glass and then with instinctual force she bumps up against the mirror, greasing her imprint against the surface. She bumps against the mirror again, harder, feeling a redness in the push of her hip bones. Again. Harder. Again. Again, until her skin is marbling with deep colors."

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Tread

"The current was strong but we knew this going in and we let it take us. I thought of the swimming lessons I took as a child. The instructor close to my ear saying with a wet tongue, “ Kick kick. My hand is here. Feel it? It is right here.”

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Pith

"I picture two scientists in a laboratory—the space, their clothes, everything crisp white. Up to their knees in oranges. Valencia. Navel. Blood. Persian."

Little Armenia

"But looking out of her bedroom window, she sees the rhythmic slow paced march of thousands pressing through to the very edges of the street and it does not seem like a far stretch to think that they might press further into her room, onto her bed, under her covers."

Units of Measurement

"I have been saving my hair in Ziploc bags, labeling in precise script the numeration of days: March 12, March 13, March 14. Measuring the loss, measuring myself as loss. There is something enormously pleasing about seeing myself, gathered, documented, consolidated–something so bodily in something so wonderfully plastic."

Puppeteer

"The body was nothing if not a destroyed thing, or a thing in the process of destruction, growing flaky and gone.  "

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A Boy Reading In The Woods

And though she was barely a year older than him he felt compelled to let her lead him because he liked that space of blind trust, the way his head grew blank and pure when he was with her. During their weekend sleepovers they’d wait until his parents fell asleep and then they’d turn off all the lights in the house, close all the curtains, and travel through the dark, bumping into the corners of large pieces of furniture. They’d eventually find each other and he would grab at the edge of her shirt, trail her by her fabric until they fell asleep on the couch. They had done this so often, he became familiar with the varying degrees of thinness between her shirts. He often caught himself wanting to say, in this one I can feel your skin tighten when you are cold, in this one you feel like wet paper, in this one I hardly recognize you at all."