Episode 3: Orphanotrophia

This week Jack and Connor tackle a poem of Connor's choosing: "Orphanotrophia" by Sun Yung Shin.

Click here or see below to read the poem. For more about Sun Yung Shin, follow this link.

[Orphanotrophia]
By: Sun Yung Shin

A broad black market 
      The women are urnfields
The children are binding out     
      Dark in the trains, a burning mouth to eat a shovelful 
      of black diamonds

Leak blood, trickle milk, time weeps
      Going over the falls
Washing to shore, done and undone
      Law-and-order, over the falls

Body paint, black ink and brush, state and subject
      Eat silver and sugar
Tobacco hair and a hospital all in gold leaf
      Baby Jesus in the alley, bright baby in a bullet

Time branching everywhere like hair
      Custody this antebellum apprentice
Rows of graves—keep spilling the liquor
      City of the dead, written from right to left

The women stand image and likeness
      The women occur copy and heir
The children, recorded, a homestead of lung and eye
      Museums of burials, the underground of giving birth to birth