Last Country
Officers
in your country are feared, my friend
states
in his statement about the power
of
states, dropped during our conversation
about
the impossibility of my having patriotism
because
I have left many countries behind.
I
am tired from making corrections, though it is
how
I pay my dues. Accepting once and for all
that
I will always be a citizen of the last country
I
am from, I say I don’t know any citizen
who
are aware of who their officers are.
My
sparring partner has a hard time
because
my last country was not his last
even
though people are killed in his, too.
From
the bar we are sitting in, I look at the officers
of
what will be my next last country
always
waiting outside.
And
I think, hell, I can probably take a few
down
with me.
And
that is very my last country of me.
Jack Saebyok Jung once planned on drawing vampire hunters and mech pilots—but then he stumbled into poetry and never left. A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he helped bring Yi Sang: Selected Works to life (Wave Books, 2020). He’s also a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow working on Kim Hyesoon’s Lady No for Ecco Press in 2026. Meanwhile, his own poetic sorcery, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (Black Square Editions, 2025), proves he’s not afraid of a little word magic.
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