Russell Grant is a poet from Durban, South Africa, living and working in Shanghai. He teaches high school English Literature and is the leader of the Inkwell Shanghai Poetry Workshop, as well as Head of Workshops for Inkwell Shanghai. His work has appeared in A Shanghai Poetry Zine and the Mignolo Arts Center’s journal Pinky Thinker Press.
After the Fact
– for the fallen at Zhengzhou
There is water in the creek, and in the sky,
and on his face, he who I watch from above
striding abreast the flow which
lumbers towards the Huangpu, mounted
by creek birds that hole up in the day
like forgotten promises.
He lumbers, too,
sucking at anxious air; drawing ancient breath;
burdened: 70% water, 30%
fermented fruit and guilt
The surface of the creek bristles in the rising wind
while a ginger cat suspends its cool indifference
to chase down shelter
in a vacant guard hut.
To the West a father
mounts a placard at a subway station exit,
sometime after the fact
and waits for her.
Above this, above all of this,
again the coiling sky spits, weeps
on towers, on parks, on runners and bikes,
on leaves loosened from their trees and
scattered on the concrete,
on the fathers of drowned daughters,
and on ginger street cats bristling in the wind
like the ruined surfaces of creeks.
~
Double-slit Experiment
- A sonnet for K, who helped me see again
Sunlight on the river blinks,
tracing waves both endless, and startless:
I observe their immaculate leaps
up from pregnant nothingness to sudden
bright peaks
shedding all possible past and future ways.
At night I trace your sleeping breath
like a pilot mapping your tireless rhythm
guided along all possible decisions
coming finally on gasping reality to rest:
Please forgive me my delayed noticing
and allow us sweetly in this moment to collapse
into a warm and most unambiguous
darkness. To settle the score between known and perhaps
and denounce all possible worlds but one
so we may find stillness before our breathing is done.
~
Longing
- A Daoist Ode to Condiments
Longing is the sauce of all unhappiness
She said, the clock adjusting like an uneasy guest
I search for a complement to your ungarnished bliss
Be like water, sufficient and saltless
Add nothing to the heartless breast
Longing is the sauce of all unhappiness
I grow weary of your philosophied spareness
Is there really no additive, no further drop to test
my resolve to find a complement for your ungarnished bliss?
Be like water, sufficient and saltless
Add nothing to the heartless breast
Longing is the sauce of all unhappiness
My deepest want, my soberest wish, is
that you quiet, please, this damned request
Longing is the sauce of all unhappiness
I long for an antedote to your ungarnished bliss