Half crumpled on the couch as another bloody world churnsin my belly, I find myself strangely comforted by the laptop’s warmth,despite what I know about radiation, coltan mining, Apple’sgrowing surveillance empire, on and on. Still,the fan purrs in the same key as the cat,whose attention I’m thrilled finally to have earned—a bit of living warmth when she rubs her cheek against my chin.A bit of sweet, and touch; it’s hard these days;you get it. Sometime in the last world,we drove to R’s with some post-top-surgery comfort food:homemade sundubu, in a big Dutch oven wrapped in three towelson my lap, and the stew, being sour and spicy and made of stufthat would keep, shared its heat with my torso like an old friend,a cheery host, a comfort, : : : When, prone on the couch, I read it again comfort when I read the phrase comfort woman againand say it, again, out loud: comfort woman comfort woman comfort woman when I read itbottle woman balm woman shhh woman bit of living proof amid the war woman it’s hard these days but at least there’s this woman girl body bisected by military cock woman crawling into the fields to vomit black woman rotten rice and blood rag stuffed deep woman comfort woman convert woman condom, again whatever helps you bear the day whatever sweet, what touch : : : how to speak to any one in a history like this. how to tell you. everything will be all right. without inheriting. the family business. : : : you who wants comfort, who are you? have you been a comfort too? say it with me: it won’t be okay and we can follow the burning shore. there’s nothing more to say. no next time but the broken before.
Comfort Poem
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- July 7, 2022
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“Comfort Poem” from THE WORLD KEEPS ENDING, AND THE WORLD GOES ON by Franny Choi.
Published by Ecco Press on November 01, 2022.
English Copyright © 2022 by Franny Choi.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective.
New York, New York
“It was Franny Choi who first taught me the truism that every utopia requires an attendant dystopia, and here she catalogues them both with aplomb. Choi charts a path through the gloom and ecstasy of everyday catastrophe, always more mundane than we expected. It’s dull and violent and lined with ancestral memory and mushrooms ready to forage. Anyone who has lived through the daily absurdity of disaster— which is to say, all of us— can find a home here.”
—Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919 and Electric Arches
“Choi builds a world not only of striking beauty and lucid politics, but also, most importantly, with love.”
—A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste
“This book gives blood, voice, and generations of memory to the slim chance that we can change this world enough to survive its endless dystopia, war, violence. Somehow this poet still believes in us: that we might read this work and, made bold with desire, love the world so deeply it has to love us back.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museumi and Tanya
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