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Yunqin Wang is a writer based in Shanghai / New York. She writes in English, Chinese, and occasionally Japanese. She has been an editor for The Poetry Society of New York. Currently, she lives in Shanghai, where she serves food at a beer bar and music at a livehouse.

The First Dream

 

On the cold hospital bed, a baby’s heart

beat like a sheet of flame. Something small

and strong in an aseptic room. She arrived

on a clear Sunday morning, where jazz

is played down at the Jing’an Temple,

men lounging in bed, watching their wives

collecting mail. She arrived with an announcement,

silent like a leaf. When the doctor handed her

the first towel, it was by instinct that she knew

it had nothing to do with the crying, but a prize

for her safe landing. She learned scents.

Felt skins. Saw shapes and colors without

rushing to name, the world full of possibilities.

What came next was an earthquake. 1996

was such a peaceful year that the earth trembled

like a huge cradle. In a flash, she saw streets

reeling backwards. She heard music

in broken things, then fell asleep

like water in yet another tide.

It was the first dream of her life. And now,

20 years later, curling in the bathtub

in a shaking room in Seattle, the dream

suddenly comes alive and she realizes

whoever built the earth must have made a terrible mistake:

he must have reached for the sky to plant the first seed,

thus the world, made upside down.

The girl grew bigger each day. Along the road,

collected stones like counting clouds. Sang

to the wrens on poles ancient tales of how

they all once kinged the lands. It is with such a dream,

that the girl learned to wing, for the rest of her life,

on the earth’s vast apron.

 

 

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David Tait’s poetry collections include Self-Portrait with The Happiness, which received an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and The AQI, which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize. His poems appear in Poetry Review, Magma, The Rialto and The Guardian. In 2017 he was Poet-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust. He lives in Shanghai and works as a teacher trainer.

 

The Snowline

 

I miss how the fields would give way to snow,

how it seemed decided between the world

and it’s watcher the exact moment

that whiteness would grow tangible.

 

Then fells, bright white and endless,

as if you could bow your head across the snowline

then raise it and be covered with a crown of frost,

fat icicles dangling from your beard.

 

I remember a farmhouse once straddling the middle

and felt jealous at the gift they’d been given,

a front door of spring and a garden of winter.

 

Whenever my heart walks through the snowline

I stop to listen to the whispering trees.

And I wonder if I’ll ever make it home.

 

~

 

At Tianchi Lake

 

There’s a small boat rowing out

from the North Korean border

and it’s the only surface movement on the lake,

too far off by far for us to hear it

the military base over there like a cabin

that can only be accessed by a slide.

 

The water changes turquoise in blotches

the lake a mirror of rolling clouds

and though our viewing platform teems

with crowds there’s silence, then the mist

climbs the mountain, creeps slowly towards us.

 

We stay for hours as it’s all we’re here for.

We stay through the rain and through the hail.

The mist comes and goes and with it the view.

We watch a hawk hunting song birds,

we watch a tour group unfurl a banner that says:

“The Number 1 Chongqing Battery Company”.

 

Mostly we watch vapour –

the way it climbs the far side of the mountain

then dips towards the lake, the way tendrils of mist

skirl down to the blue like souls reaching out

for the world, the shock of being taken away too soon,

of being pushed back out to the wild sky.

 

~

 

The Panorama Trick

 

He’s doing that trick again with his camera –

some picture of a landscape: where he’ll appear

on both the left and right sides of the picture

laughing at our mother, or pulling a face.

 

To us it was first rate magic, and almost incidental

were the landscapes between faces, pine forests in

Scandinavia, suspension bridges and monuments.

How does he move so fast? Does he have a twin?

 

The trick, like death, was to creep up behind her,

to settle in some blind spot and wait.

My mother’s hand slowly tracked the panorama

 

as he chuckled behind her. He’s doing it still,

but no longer emerging on the right-hand side. Our mother

keeps panning to the right, keeps waiting for him to appear.

 

 

 

 

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Choo Yi Feng is currently an undergraduate majoring in life sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His short stories have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Alluvium, the journal of Literary Shanghai, and Curios. His aspirations are divided between becoming a fiction writer and a marine biologist.

 

An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial

Imagine with me what the experience of biological death might be like: a long sleep, an all-enveloping heaviness, a gentle and irreversible descent away from the world of light and into a mysterious, unknowable plane of darkness. The body grows cold, its metabolic processes slowing down. Skin becomes clammy, bloodless and prone to rupture. Soft tissue melts away, boundaries between body and earth blurred until even hard, mineral bone is chiselled and ground into dust.

<<I’m hungry. It’s like I haven’t eaten in months. Life is lightless, cold, and there is a weight crushing upon my body. There is always a weight crushing upon my body. I am drifting, an erratic tick coursing along my flesh every half-minute or so, in bold defiance of the void before me, scandalising it with my vulgar display of motion, of liveliness>>

For decades, marine science enthusiasts have been obsessed with whale falls: infrequent occurrences where the massive bodies of dead whales are devoured by the lightless abyss, collapsing upon the flat, grey expanse of the ocean floor with all the entropic force of a sub-nuclear missile. Blubbery flesh and decaying tissue is greedily exploited by an eclectic and charismatic community of bizarre sea creatures: chunks of flesh are first shorn away by giant sharks and monstrous deep-sea isopods. The residue hardly goes to waste, and is picked clean by an army of skeletal brittle stars, phantasmal octopuses and squat lobsters. Whale falls are able to support complex (yet transient) ecosystems anywhere from decades to even two centuries. They have been studied intensively as highly effective vessels for carbon sequestration, and their impacts on abyssal communities are well-documented.

<<The carcass calls out to me, its chemical trails of rot hitting me like a wall of heat, sending a liquid fire spreading through my limbs, my nerves stinging and ablaze. A blinding light tugs at a point just behind the soft palate of the roof of my mouth, producing an itch that cannot be scratched. This is what a magnet feels like when placed enticingly close, yet insufferably separate, to its opposite pole>>

Kyeong-Pane Pelagic Mortuary Services has been providing clients with the unique experience of abyssal burials for coming to twenty-five years now. With new footage from our remote deep-sea submersible, we show you the inner workings of a funerary practice that has become massively popular in the past few years.

<<I have reached a twenty-four-hour convenience store along a bygone alley down the middle of a city district where every other door is shuttered and everyone has fled, gone home. The lights are blinding, the cans and packets lining the aluminium shelves glossed in hyper-colour, screaming in glee. It is dark outside. There are shapes and shades that scare me. In here, I am free to eat air-flown Italian pesto with sun-dried cherry tomatoes. Semi-molten butterscotch brownies. Flash-fried Instant noodles with individually-sealed sachets of oil, seasoning, fried shallots and dark sauce>>

The first location our vessel will be visiting is the South Banda Basin in Indonesia, a country well-known for the rich coral reefs its archipelago hosts, and for many, a poignant symbol of the wonders of the underwater world. This burial ship bearing the legacies of eighty of our clients was sunken only eight months ago, and is still in the first phase of abyssal burial. Within hours of its touchdown upon the soft sediments of the vast, grey abyssal plain, a wealth of opportunistic predators emerged from the darkness, drawn by the scent trail of decomposing soft tissue. We documented twenty-two different species that were drawn to the burial ship within this period, including several bluntnose sixgill shark, a new record for the region.

<<I widen my jaws and sink my teeth in, spasming and writhing with my last reserves of strength in order to separate clods of soft tissue and twangy sinew from tasteless bone. The first bite, the first swallow does nothing to fill the emptiness within. I circle around, diving in for another, hurling myself into the orgy of bodies dead and living. In the hazy confusion, the pesto jar spills and is mixed with the golden butterscotch core of the chocolate pastries. A flurry of flavours—tangy, sharp, sickly sweet, greasy, gooey, crumbly, juicy, woody—assaults me. Ruinous flesh for ruinous beings. They slide along my guy, spreading their half-digested richness to fill out the contours of my being over and over. As I consume flesh, it consumes me>>

Moving now to our colleagues further north, we encounter a burial ship sunken eight years ago near the Meiyo-Daisan Seamount in the Sea of Japan. By now, most of the soft tissue has been devoured, and even fine particles of organic matter carefully combed and scavenged by smaller creatures such as spider crabs and octopuses. Osedax bone worms now colonise the hard skeleton that is remaining, boring into the vestigial osseous structures and beginning the process of converting this last trace of a body into ocean dust. Our burial ship here is so densely matted with the sinuous forms of bone worms that from afar, the skulls and femurs take on a fuzzy appearance. One notable tenant of the Meiyo-Daisan burial ship is the legacy of Mr Ryuji Tsugoda, who headed the Tsugoda multinational tech firm during his brief, yet productive twenty-nine-year reign. Mr Ryuji was one of the first individuals to publicly endorse and promote abyssal burials, and thus a key contributing figure to the massive popularity that Kyeong-Pane enjoys today.

<<The shelves were picked clean lifetimes ago, and yet everyone remained—persisting in the light, in the comfort of a twenty-four-hour convenience store on the ocean floor. Now we comb the containers that rise out of the ground, that branch and bifurcate. They grow steel arms and legs but have no heads. They are vending machines arrayed with dozens of slots, mostly empty, but some hosting the occasional prize. Chocolate rounds with peanut butter filling. Alaskan king crab, offered by the leg. Disposable panties. We sift, climb, parse, forage, salvage, disassemble, gather. This place is chronically understocked. Each generation reckons with the possibility that it will be the last, until generations bleed into one another, and precarity and finality become perennial>>

Research and monitoring remain our top priorities. We are constantly planning prospective studies and follow-ups to existing burials in order to verify and substantiate claims of carbon sequestration and to ensure that our projects are truly zero-energy and zero-waste.

<<The first flakes brush lightly against the crown of my cilia as they make their ethereal decent downwards, and it is a while before I recognise the taste of snow. The lights will grow stronger again now, after burning for so long. A storm of fairy dust descends with all the entropic force of a comet. I feel the paper-thin veneer of my shell begin to tremble and rupture with the glee of possibilities>>

We want to know how the legacies of our clients continue to nourish and enrich the abyss, whether it be on a timeline of eight months, eight years or eight decades. One current development that my colleagues are working on is a periodic re-infusion of human-derived nutrients into existing burial sites to facilitate complex, multi-layered successional eco-scapes. The possibilities, like the endless benthos that we are mapping in ever-finer detail, are multiplying exponentially. At Kyeong-Pane, it is not just about what you are buying, but what you are buying into.

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The Ogura Hyakunin-Isshu is one of the most popular poetry collections in classical Japanese literature. Since its reputed compilation by Fujiwara no Teika around 1235, it has been widely read and parodied. Artists produced artworks inspired by the poems, and a card game made in modern times is still played in Japanese homes. The presence of classical poetry stars, including the authors of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, and the protagonist’s model in the Tale of Ise must be one reason for its enormous popularity. The poems chosen are not necessarily the best works of the respective poets, and many have suspected political undercurrents in the selection. Such speculations add more mystery to the collection. The thirteenth century in Japan was a chaotic time in history: the grace and elegance of the aristocratic era, as depicted in these poems, was a thing of the past. Still, as the introduction to this book states, “Poetry was central to life and reputation among the ruling elite of medieval Japan, but these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers. They include love, loneliness and mortality, as well as the passage of the seasons and the beauty, of natural phenomena. Many are steeped in the rites and sensibilities of the Shinto religion, with gods to be found in every natural thing.” It is no wonder, therefore, that numerous translations into contemporary Japanese and many other languages along exist, along with annotations.  A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan is one of the newest efforts.

First, I read A Gap in the Clouds from the beginning to end without any critical thought. I tried to imagine how an average reader new to Hyakunin-Isshu and expecting poetry would find this book. The page layout is artful, and all of the one-hundred poems are very accessible. The book introduces the reader to who a hundred poets were and what type of subjects they dealt with. The translations are consistent with the principles described in the introduction. I thought, maybe, they achieved the goal for the book.

Then, I read the original poems and the contemporary translation with annotations in Japanese to refresh my memory and compare the details. I  read classical Japanese to a degree, but the annotation and an “old-word” dictionary are indispensable. I chose a particular book^[1] for reference because it is one of the newest translations, and the translator Koike Masayo is a prominent poet and a favourite of mine. Her translations are in free verse. The length varies, and it is a creative translation without going overboard.

The authors of A Gap in the Clouds have worked very diligently to convey the gist of each poem with the constraints as explained clearly in the introduction. I had thought their process was reasonable and understandable at first. I will explain the objections that came to me after having read the books and thought things through.

Quite a few unfortunate grammatical misunderstandings have altered the context.^[2] I noticed very puzzling phrases^[3] and a ‘prosy’ style of writing in general. It’s possible that while polishing the final output, unintended changes crept in. Some are possibly considered as an alternative interpretation. Such instances are common in translations, and I have no intention of nitpicking. However, one question that kept coming back to this reviewer’s mind was whether this book challenged to claim that poetry was something translatable.

There are some delightful translations. For example, the words “tendril,” “vine,” and “entwined” of #25 (refer to the introduction, please) replicate the tangle of the original very well. #32 contains the phrase “one-by-one,” which doesn’t exist in the original; however, the insertion added animation that works beautifully.  #72 also works quite well to replicate the waves, if not its flirtatiousness.

In No. 96, however, the translation conveys the poem’s surface meaning, but certain eroticism is completely lost. The first seventeen sounds of the original describe a garden in intricate language: The play on words on seduction and the snow-storm-blown flower petals constitute a charming adjective for a garden. The written-out translation somehow erases the imagery.

The circumstances under which these poems were written were far more social than a popular image of poets agonising over their lines and diction. These poems were written for greetings, occasions, and competitions. Many were written to show off knowledge of allusions, wonderful metaphors, and witty or irate responses. Some of them mock love affairs. True emotions do exist; some poems are more emotional than technical. Literally, one hundred different voices, attitudes, and backgrounds of the elite class spans about four hundred years are crammed in this anthology.

Overall, this reviewer’s biggest complaint is that the translated poems sound overly monotonous; they do not sound like a hundred poets’ voices. I may be asking for the different level of considerations which may be out of the scope of the authors’ intentions; however, some deconstructions might be interesting to some readers.

Knowledge of the background stories might transform the reading experience of some of the poems. The first example is #60. The last sentence, “So I say,” helps accentuate the author’s strong-headedness. At the end of the book, the note mentions the author is the daughter of Izumi Shikibu, the representative poetess of the classical poetry world. But if a reader knows that this poem was a spontaneous come-back to a man who teased her whether she received advice from her mother who was living in Ama no Hashidate at that time, it might have added more colour to the poem.

#7. It may be a matter of interpretation; however, the two moons the poem deals will heighten its poignancy once a reader knows those two moons belong to the parallel worlds: one being the moon the author sees at night in China; The other moon was the moon of long ago in his hometown where he’d probably never return. In fact, he didn’t return to Japan.

How do you incorporate such backgrounds? You might ask. It must be hard. However, I know an example by Kevin Young, who did this for Basho’s poem.

 

Look at its shape

the moon is just a young girl

sent to bed^[4]

 

The original poem (miru Kage ya / Mada katanari mo/you zukiyo or 見る影やまだ片なりも宵月夜) doesn’t contain a word “girl” or “bed.”

The translation by Jane Reichhold is:

 

see its slim shape

it is still not developed

the new moon this night^[5]

 

One more step removed, her literal translation is like this:

see shape <> / still immature /new moon evening [or good]

 

Basho used Katanari, knowing it was the word used for a girl-child as being “pure” in the Tale of Genji and emphasised the young moon’s elusiveness (You Zuki). You Zuki is a” young new moon that appears only early in the evening and then disappears,” according to Reichhold’s definition. I recognise that haiku and waka are different; David Young offered new translations for the selected haiku, yet his translation made me immediately go to the original poem in Japanese and other translations, and found it satisfying.

I want to discuss pronoun use in a couple of poems. #5 specifies that “I hear a deer cry out.” I noticed it on my first read, and the poet Koike Masayo also writes about the difference between having a person and a deer in the scene. She maintains that the presence of “I” dilutes the poetics of the piece, and “I” might be somewhere, but it functions just as an ear, let the deer cry out, and “I” should remain in hiding. The translation also works just fine without “I hear.”

Likewise, #6 begins with “I cross toward the sky.” By this, the man is placed in a fantasy world. However, the poem deepens when the reader knows the man is awake late into the night and is standing in the cold in the palace as he looked up at the sky, which plays out the legend of Magpie, a bird of black and white like the dark sky and the bright stars. Grammatically, that is how one should read it.

#9 is one of the best-known and most beautiful poems by Ono no Komachi. Regrettably, the use of the “you” personification destroyed the complexity and the atmosphere of this poem. The poem’s focus should be the quiet reflection about the passage of time: The peak-time flower petal is not the only beauty there is to be appreciated. The highly technical sound and the flow of the poem didn’t survive the translation.

As mentioned earlier, those who write and translate poetry constantly wonder whether poetry is a translatable thing – whether it functions when taken out of the world it was written in. Translating into contemporary Japanese is a challenge; translating into a foreign language adds another layer due to the total lack of common knowledge and expectations. Even with contemporary poems, solely translating the text without knowing how the poet’s writing style and viewing things is risky. Needless to say, knowledge of allusions and historical backgrounds are basic requirements. A poet/translator must pack it back into the destination language in a poetically appealing way. It is a humbling exercise. It is the duty of cross-cultural translation to encompass all of those aspects. If the end-product is a beautiful creation inspired by the original poems, but not a translation in the traditional sense, I would love to read it. I am inquisitive about what the step-by-step process of their translation was like.

 

Miho Kinnas is a Japanese writer and translator of poetry. Math Paper Press of Singapore published “Today, Fish Only” and “Move Over, Bird.” She grew up playing the Hyakunin-Isshu card game.

 

^[1] Hyakunin-Isshu trans. Koike Masayo (Vol. 2 Japanese Literature Series) Kawaide-Shobo

^[2] #11, 19, 20, 27, 47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 59, 63

^[3] #3lily-of-the-valley I would like to be informed of the allusion.  It seems unnecessary and spring flower seems an ill-fit.  #88 shipwrecked!

^[4] Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times – Selected Haiku of Basho Translated by David Young

^[5] Basho The Complete Haiku Translated with an introduction, biography & notes by Jane Reichhold. This book is invaluable.  David Young heavily depended on her extensive research and translations.

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DS Maolalaí has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019).

 

The onion smell.

 

my window is open.

through it

stumble words,

each holding a glass

to its chest,

with the onion smell

of hotdogs

and the sharpness

of discount

white wine. out

on the shared patio

my neighbours

are having a party. chatting

about drunken train-rides,

sex stories

and loud laughter

bright like running water. I

am inside, mean

with a mean book

and a glass of my own,

searching the silence,

too hungry to live

on the scent

of fried meat. I close my window

against any intrusion of company

and turn on the radio.

biting an apple

I light a candle

to mask that onion smell.

 

~

 

My favourite ex-girlfriend

 

in the pub

in a blizzard

around 2014

with james,

near to dispatch

sneaking out

when the shift

had got busy. enjoying

our beers; discussing

the job

over lunch

with a cold pint

of lager – deciding

who was hot

in the office. we were kids

I suppose, or just barely

not kids – considering work

in the light

of the schoolyard.

I mentioned

that one girl –

can’t remember

her name – made me think

of my favourite

ex-girlfriend. it was true,

I suppose, in the way

these things are –

they were both

at least blonde

and quite serious.

 

~

 

A new hat.

 

I buy a new hat

and a turtleneck

jumper. you also

buy jumpers,

a cardigan

and button-up

blouse. on the walk

back through town

we get two scoops

of ice cream

and sit a while,

nudging each other

whenever we see

a new dog. I am wearing

my hat – the rest

are in bags.

we can’t try them out

in this boiling

hot heat.

when we’re done

with the ice cream

we go back to the house.

something, in all this,

is happening.

 

~

 

My painting.

 

there are buildings

stacked in red

and textured orange,

with windows

picked ahead

in white squares.

 

and you can tell

it’s a view of a river

because the bottom half

is the top

made blurry

like a reflection

on the uncalm water

you get in dublin

 

though the buildings here are not red

they are blue,

or grey

with pessimistic eyes

 

horizontal slashes

done with a brush

haphazard, raised

and a shape

that could be a person

picked out

in lighter colours.

 

it is on my wall

near to the window

and visible from the toilet

if you don’t shut the door.

 

we all have things

that bring sparks in our lives

it just happens that mine

is a landscape

 

done in red

which looks much like dublin

if you look at it

through non-prescription

glasses.

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DS Maolalaí has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019).

 

The mattress.

 

the building manager

works for a company

which also sells furniture.

bargaintown. they’re quite

well known, and we go in,

tell them where we live.

expect a discount

on our new mattress

and get nothing

if you don’t count

delivery.

 

it’s a five minute walk,

even carrying the mattress;

I could probably do it

myself. we take it

all the same. they’ve let us

have a dog – no sacrifice

on their part, but I guess

we feel we owe them. we don’t –

we pay rent. chrys

makes good money, and I

do alright. we can meet

our responsibilities – god damn

there’s nothing like it.

 

we can afford full price

on the mattress.

if they made us pay delivery

could afford it.

 

~

 

Dirty.

 

and you’re hanging out

in the hallway of your building

just because that’s where

the washing machine

1. laundry;

you need clean clothes

if you want to keep your job,

keep your friends

and keep your girlfriend

happy.

 

a neighbour comes out

while you’re waiting.

she’s young, she’s pretty,

and she lives next door,

and walks past fast

just as you’re packing

a handful of underwear.

you say hi

and keep looking

as she opens the door

and goes out.

 

you’ve met her husband;

he seems nice,

even if he didn’t have a corkscrew

when you needed one.

but this

is still embarrassing;

no-one likes a girl

to know their pants get dirty.

 

at least, not very

early on.

 

~

 

How it was that evening.

 

the wind ran hard

and stampede steady,

knocking down grass

like the corners on pages

of an interesting

book. and the sky was a dull

red colour outside,

his daughter

crying, some god

or other

making rain.

 

 

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DS Maolalaí has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016) and “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019).

 

The safety of populated lights.

 

cars on the street

which settle into spaces,

heavy and hanging

as hocks of aged beef.

 

the windows all open

over closed shops and offices

releasing cigarette clouds

like cold morning mouths.

 

a woman walking quickly

to get out of a side street

and back to the safety

of populated lights. a man

 

feeling casual

at the door

to his apartment,

adjusting the weight

of his groceries.

 

~

 

The copper of bones

 

trying my hand

again at Selby Jr

in my comfortable

apartment

with its balcony

in the Dublin

northside. Last Exit

doesn’t work now –

neither does

Requiem. I first

came across them

in elbowish rooms

in Toronto and the north

end of London. something

of the copper

of bones here

I thought. something

of life – a toilet

by the stove

and four feet

from the bedclothes. and art

needs discomfort

to appreciate

properly. Selby

doesn’t function

when the water

heater does.

 

~

 

The names of plants.

 

reading a book

and learning the names

of various grasses,

the texture of trees

and how to tell a flower

from another flower.

nothing much like close

to the beauty

of the pasture scene

spread before us

like marmalade

scraping over bread,

but I must admit,

begrudgingly,

it does give poems

some variety.

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LeeAnne Lavender is an international educator and poet living in Shanghai. She is Canadian, and has made Shanghai her home for six years. She has also lived in Kenya and South Korea, and is spending more and more time writing, immersed in the beauty of words. 

 

Shanghai Moment

There’s a spot on the Huangpu path

where music floats to the sun.

A trumpet croons, alto tones

rich and burnished with

the city’s pulse.

 

An old man sits nearby,

staring at the river,

his foot tapping to the music

in the most imperceptible of ways.

 

He comes every morning

to this cathedral of sound,

proffering his prayers to the river gods.

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A. J. Huffman’s poetry, fiction, haiku, and photography have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.

 

On an Asphalt Carousel 

 

I spin like a horse without reins.

Head inclined, my mind melts

like fresh tar, drenches the floor

in a floodlight of weariness.

 

My legs scream blind exhaustion

from a forgotten memory of running

without shoes or feet.  My body flashes

in camera-quick blinks of delumination.

 

My ears, frantic to erase the echo

of footprints, the static noise of a million boys,

falling in line to mount me, collapse inside themselves,

bear scars as witness to nothing my body claims to feel.

 

I turn my black eyes inward,

focus on the conceptual force of circulation,

desperate to believe.  I am first.

I will last.  The in between

will pass in fuzzy fury, forgettable as any other

dream.

 

~

 

from Jellyfish this Illustration 

 

of independence.  These free-

                                                floating,

aquatic hobos epitomize lack

of definition, lack

                              of confinement,

lack of interest in conventional

                                                  ly travelled

                                                  pathways.

Instead, they wander

            the waves,

turning &

            diving

            on mere

            whim.

 

~

 

Camelopardalis 

 

Spots of skin call attention

to elongated neck, desire

to graze trees that that cannot live

without atmosphere.  Herbivorous tendencies

manifest themselves as mournful echo

of midnight.  I am faux Narcissus,

staring at such a familiar reflection.

It is not mine.  I am not its.  We are not even

in the same hemisphere of reality,

yet my legs walk

on grassless skies, my mouth opens in mock

consumption of nothing.  We exist in simultaneous

stasis, destined to disappear

every dawn.

 

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Ana Pugatch is the Poetry Heritage Fellow at George Mason University in Virginia. She is a Harvard graduate who taught English in Zhuhai and Shanghai. While living in China, she also completed the Woodenfish Foundation’s Humanistic Buddhist Monastic Life Program. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as The Los Angeles Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, Short Edition, and The Bangalore Review, among others.

 

A MOTHER’S VISIT

 

Yangshuo, China

 

She sensed how her daughter

now looked down on her. That

the earth had turned slowly

 

into night. That her kin would only be

a distant moon. She watched shards

of light slice through

 

the bamboo thicket, the stars’ edges

hardened and cooled. In daytime

she marveled at the strength

 

of a water buffalo, how its shoulders

could shift continents. But her daughter

knew this wasn’t enough, because

 

she’d been there—looking down

from the bamboo raft, and below

the glass surface seeing what flickered

 

in turbid darkness. Like her mother

she thought of the day when the river

would freeze over, and how

 

she would give anything

to be something other

than its stillness.

 

~

 

STONE FOREST

 

Memory paints the strokes of each

character as I look for Shilin’s sign:

石林. Mouth of stone, trees side by side.

 

The bus approaches its karst jaws—

jagged shadow of one last argument,

this mausoleum sealed. Among

 

the throngs of tapered spikes,

our weak bones calcify. This time,

they do not heal into a lantern sun.

 

You are my stone forest, I lay you

to rest. I lay you to rest in the stone

forest. Limestone memories at dusk.

 

This is a good place to leave us behind.

 

~

 

GUANYIN

 

That night I entered a room full of orchids. Dust coated their unstirring faces behind glass. The stems of my arms were reflected back to me, the pallor of light on snow.

 

In the furthest corner hung a mirror. Along its edges I could make out the stilled hands of Guanyin, the petals of the lotus. Her vase was empty of its water, its relief.

 

When I exhaled, the halo of arms moved like feathers. Her smile fanned out each concentric row of hands. A thousand arms and eyes for those in need, an eye on every palm—

 

I reached out to touch the darkened glass. She knew then that I lacked compassion, felt the emanation of my pride. Low, low, rooted like the orchid too firmly to the ground.

 

Her smile withdrew, her eyes blind and unseeing. The feather-arms rattled like the deafening roar of cicadas. Their tremors shattered the mirror, and the infinite lives between us.

 

 

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