A WE poem and two YOU poems

Isabella Choi
→ BFA ILL 2025

_{All images courtesy of the author}

And It Could Be Funny

Next winter, I will hold your glove in a cold hand
And heat it up with smoky breath
Tomorrow, I will kiss an empty window
Later on, you will try to softly rouge the mark

Again, I leave hairs on the bathroom floor
They’re weaving into a taut tripwire
I fell into a puddle and chose to stay in it

You fell in cooling pool Beyond anything

Because I wear sports caps
And you still go at the game

Because I was a spotted dog in my past life
And you were a bird that never made a sound

Holes in a Poem
I Promised to Write

I watched a boy become prettier than I
And threw his phone against the concrete
The sparks flew like Young Birthdays

I’ll know the world a little better once it has already ended

My twelfth birthday, I had wished to be stronger than you
I’ve only told the stone behind my house
Its cracked now an evergreen died on it
A single tear then fell from a now opened pore

When we were able to cry from the same eye
Black spheres clacking inside threads of hammock
It's all just a growing sound fading from the edges

I’ll still keep open your tired mouth
And brush the pink of your throat
Hoping for a kinder choice of words

Maybe, in a dreamable wrapped 모양

To Trip on a Fan Cord
Means an Automatic Death

While an egg rolls from between a pigeon’s legs
Salted sound buried under a weak nettle pile
A similar weight, rests on my shoulder
As I run a bow across a violin
One, that’s already playing itself

An orange light
The dye from a balsam flower
Hand holding an unpicked stone
Staggering with a hollow weight, the meaning of it
Lost somewhere, maybe
In an apartment near Olympic Park
A ghost of a stray mosquito
Still bumping into things

Again, we are sitting in front of the fan
Child that can only say “건강하세요”
Mother is, again, wearing worn sleepwear
A big damp shape
Unfurling from Grandmother’s back
Somethings stay hidden
Amongst shaking tinsel wings

Because these thin hands aren’t strong enough
I hold a mole that’s been there longer than I
A mark that has, somehow, become mysterious

Izzy Choi misses coin karaoke.