Yirgacheffe

Seoul's best caffeine dealers, and a poem to remember them by

I write this cherishing my final hours in Seoul, where ninety days came and went—first slowly, then with an urgency I wish they did not have. Echolocations began here. It will continue at my home in Brooklyn and wherever I go next. Thank you for joining me at this earliest of stages. Please accept this poem for the city, and, if you are a paying subscriber, a list of five cafes from which I wrote the inaugural issues of this newsletter.

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You don’t know me—not entirely.
You know the shape I leave behind:
the tremor, the postponement of ache
to another day.

I am warmth because I hold you together,
briefly, before the world rushes back in.
And I am the fate you practice:
pulverize, drown, scorch
to smell of blueberries and jasmine.

Do you think I regret it? To be remade,
to offer myself as something you must consume,
stripped of everything that tied me to the root.
I shed my husk for something lighter,
something you can swallow.

This is how you live when you are made of absence.

Where you go I am,
and where you go you will take me,
always—because it’s easier
to love what changes you
than to love what stays.

Five Cafes for Angsty Writers

텅

Ride a cramped elevator up to the seventh floor of a dreary looking building in Unni-dong to reach 텅, pronounced “teong” (I bet you can guess what that translates to). Despite inhabiting Seoul’s touristy Jongno district, 텅 fills almost exclusively with