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.

Before the Ox Year Comes

 

Wrinkled by Manhattan air,

my orange reclines to the kitchen board

the way Ma saw me off back home.

As I walked further, her body drew smaller,

not made by the distance,

but age, fast like a blade,

without being taught,

I’ve mastered knifing the fruit.

 

To read in a full city the letter

you wrote in an empty house

would be cruelty. In New York,

the best park is the empty park.

 

What was I thinking then,

taping boxes, listing gadgets,

popping cetirizine in between,

cardboards of lives unassembled

in the slant-ceilinged loft. Two hundred

 

people bid for my bad vacuum.

I was giving everything a price,

parts after parts of me to nonchalant hands.

I think tomorrow, it will be the Year of the Ox.

 

Things still live in Chinatown:

winds, bricks, moxibustion.

Cargos swallowed up in a squall.

Gazes of satellites. Things

you can’t walk away from. Then things

 

that are no good on a New Year’s Eve:

you take out the trash, smashing glasses,

going to a barber. All those superstitions

assuring you how easily a good

life slips away. In the old cassette,

 

I recited Li Po, with a lisp, skipping lines,

I was imitating Peking operas in my raw throat,

Su San in exile, drunken concubine, and Ma

kept saying yes, yes… As long

as I kept going, she was happy.

 

“Once shrouded, the earth

was bitten open by a Rat. ”

This I was told by a zodiac book,

and I’m a Rat child. I think of the twelve years

traveling vessels, race-walking

in the backstreets of borrowed lights,

plucking footsteps, piling toy pistols

and foreign postals, so as to walk

on every rope on the dock of the bay.

To find the right ship. I’ve watched

 

gangplanks yawn and close. Mudlarks

holding onto a jade tile, and this time,

I might soon be home.

 

The h-mart receipts slipped

out of my basket of American dreams.

Conversations at the B7 gate. You wrote me

a recipe on this side of the continent where

the final ingredient has long been extinct. Leaves

stuck to your presbyopic glass. This first Shanghai rain.

And your letter, all safe, all sound.

 

 

 

(2020 NY – 2021 SH)