Kaixuan Yao is a recent NYU Shanghai graduate. In her poems she tries to explore the notion of modernity, tradition, and inheritance, as well as the relationships of different physical and mental spaces.

 

 

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Dowry

Who would know

In this casket lies a pair of jade
earrings crowned with gold
sealed and piled over by old
letters and cards and envelopes
sleeping sound and tidy

sleeping sound and tidy
for years and outside
she lived like a river
they lived like a river
thumping, gushing, clenching, bleeding
what’s in the casket is
in the casket sleeping

sound and tidy sound of
tidy swallows that used to gather
in front of courts of
Wang and Xie now fly in
under the eaves of common families

families with legacies
passed down from a distant ancestry
from them and we trace back to She
and She knew

her daughters, and daughters of daughters, her shadows, thousands of She
would need a dignity so green