Ren Jie writes poetry and fiction. He recently graduated from Yale-NUS College in Singapore, majoring in Literature and Creative Writing, and currently works at NYU Shanghai as a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow. In his writing, Ren Jie engages with and explores questions about culture, religiosity, and the experience and narratives that surround familial life.
Three Business Days Abroad
- When three days’ reply is too long. Here is a glittering mesh of sun and steel. Here the construction of a crane, like a half-bow, to a cloudless sky, missing the sun. Scaffolding is tribute, twisted like a nest of harsh lines.
- This dimple of dust is impurity. Fragrance is anesthetized: the sterility of office floors, swept clean, fogged hourly. Fogged like the traces of home. Fogged like the swirl of raindrops: a summer storm, brittle needles shattering into blackened streams. Drip down to gutter-water drains, to refuse.
- Rotund hopes can only stop and sink. A globule of whiteness hovers, like some calcified hope, clinging to a paycheck, to blankness.
- These office walls soak the chatters. Your stutter, your chinese is violence concealed, peeling off the walls, spittle landing on coat and suit. Wilting, your starched collar flattens into silence.
- On the bus home, creases of your shirt fall like waves, enveloped by a springy ooze, the pooling of yellowing sponge. A sticky urge, collapsing between fingers.
- This brief shower reminds you of absence. Outside, a company of mosquitoes hovers over puzzles, the wriggling structures of a newborn, hatching like thin reeds. They rise like fragmented rust; like autumn snowfall, offerings to a troubled sky.
- You scramble stray threads. In loose ends, some semblance of warmth. Her long hair like blessing, some healing for the stretch marks. The crook of her arm, the coarseness of your sheets.
- The dirt track has since become waterlogged. Your fingers curl for warmth, in puddles that splash against the ankles. Stiffened hairs, dampened fabric-worn socks, drifting like spidery foam. Spring rain pools like stains of darkness.
- The whispery cry of a toilet door, cleaving itself ajar. The creaks, the sudden gusts of wind. A thin silver of light: like absolution, like some searching for sleep.
- The thunderclap feels foreign. The new glasses speak exclusion. You gasp at the tepidity of tapwater, at the gleam of a half-shadow, the whiteness of a sink. Another city’s water always tastes bitter.
- When you wonder: “Is this home?” Your baldness stares back, a glimmer, an egg; where lamplight frames a face, swollen like a thin bulb, tired on windy nights.
- But the city cares not for tired eyes. The pounding, the shrill cry, rising in construction thin as graves, rising as a shower of sparks. Cities build their roots on scars.
- You refresh your inbox. You wait for an answer.