在梁小曼這 裏 ，描寫瞬息之中個體的詩歌，本身處在 一個時間系統，即過去與未來的呼應之中，人是被過去塑 造的，也是如〈敲鐘人〉一詩，被遙遠的、未知的未來所 遙控的，既有宿命論式的貫穿，也有無常衝擊下的斷裂。 這一問題其實是 T. S. 艾略特〈四個四重奏〉的迴響（插 一句，她善於處理經典中的遺留問題，如〈豹〉一首，可 與里爾克的〈豹〉對讀，里爾克寫豹的擬詩人化，但是梁 小曼寫圍觀豹時，詩人與豹通過「詩」連接，最後的關注 點落在圍觀的詩人本身，不再是豹與詩人的合一，中間介 入了艾略特「非個人化」策略），一如她在 札 記中所說， 詩人感受到的既是此刻，也是過去與未來，窗外的鳥發出 了初生的死亡與鳴叫，或長詩〈紅的因式分解〉中所引的 最後一句 “I think of the past and the future as well / as the
新起一行詩：梁小曼特輯
present to determine where I am” 。詩〈金色泳池〉中寫少 女，令人驚詫 「她不知道，後來／她又活了二十九 年」，這句既是回觀過去，又是對於彼時的預言。
For three days straight, through tunnels through dreams, waking up to bare trees under my balcony, barely anything to eat, I had glimpses of my past life, that I was a carpenter, a recluse living in a mountain cabin, in which all furniture was made of black walnut, and cloud skeletons lay mostly quiet, except for when the air was damp and smelled of sour milk, and my sense of reality tenuous: though lights poured in, it felt like working through a long night to the sound of drizzle on tin. All my life I never felt at ease, not even in the Oxford winters, when dusk proceeded right after noon, bike racing through Queen’s Lane, browsing on Broad Street, fake snow in shop windows, something personal about the cold, the whisky burning in my stomach. I went to get wine from the Waitrose at Paddington Station once. I booked my flight a day late and went to see my girlfriend off at Heathrow and took the train back. The woman at the counter checked my identification and said, “You’re just my son’s age. He’s in Spain. He goes out too much.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder and looked at the platforms, where each train departs from someone’s need to be alone. It was the most intoxicating wine I ever had, and I felt it afterward on my intercontinental flight, the humming, the delirium, the childhood fantasy of running away, and an idea kept cropping up in my mind, that a spaceship represents two things: the feeling of being protected, and the possibility of escape. I read my friend’s obit yesterday, and I knew in a few hours people would begin to say all the words people say in these moments, but everything we do now we do for the living. The darting river seemed calmer from the distance, and the bare trees swung gently despite strong winds, and between branches, I could see cars rushing through a white bridge.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
Guest Editor’s Preface: As Though She Had Never Left Our Side
Heidi Yu Huang Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
It is now nearly a year since the passing of the poet and artist Liang Xiaoman. On 13 November 2024, at the brief farewell ceremony held on the day of her departure, Chen Dongdong spoke with restraint yet with clarity of her remarkable gifts and achievements: in poetry and prose, in photography and painting, in translation and her mastery of languages. These had already found expression in her published collections of poems and photographs, in her translations and exhibitions, where they drew both attention and affection. Over the past year, her manuscripts and unfinished works in these fields have been carefully gathered and edited, their full countenance awaiting a more fitting occasion to be revealed. In this same year, certain memorial events have taken place, such as “Rainbow Train—The Liang Xiaoman Memorial Exhibition” at Shanghai’s Yu Society. Once, in response to the Proustian question “In what form would you like to return to the world?”, Liang Xiaoman replied: “As a folder in a database…” She also once observed: “I have never left, but I have always been returning.” Indeed, what she wrote, photographed, painted, translated and uttered has preserved those messages most worth keeping, distilled through the span of her life’s passage in this world. To read them, to look upon them, is to find her once more among us.
On the first anniversary of Liang Xiaoman’s passing, we are preparing another commemorative gathering: The Liang Xiaoman Poetry Reading, to be held in Shenzhen, the city of her birth and childhood, at the United Bookstore in UpperHills, a place she cherised. To coincide with this occasion, “A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature” of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and will have its first launch at the reading. Earlier, in Issue 72
of Voice & Verse, Liang Xiaoman’s essay “I Was Born into Cantonese” appeared (this present issue carries its English translation). At the close of that piece, she affirmed her place not as a poet who had come to settle in Shenzhen, but as the city’s first poet born and raised there. For this reason, to launch this issue of Voice & Verse in Shenzhen itself, and to hold such a memorial event there, carries a special significance.
The phrase “A New Line of Poetry” is taken from the title of Mr Du Peng’s essay in this issue. As he writes, it “embodies both Liang Xiaoman’s stance in writing and the singularity of her texts.” His words were themselves inspired by Mr Ouyang Jianghe, who once remarked at a conference that Liang Xiaoman’s writing was to “begin on a new line” (see this issue’s “A Linguistic Landscape of the Present and the Future—Abridged Record of the Symposium on Liang Xiaoman’s Poetry”). To use “A New Line of Poetry” as the title of this special feature devoted to her is to signal the new images and new qualities that her writing has given to poetry.
This special feature presents twenty-two of Liang Xiaoman’s poems. Among them, “A Petal of Spring” is an early work which she herself attempted to render into English; that version was once borrowed for the farewell of a young British woman who had died before her time. The rest are translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, and Chris Song. Also included in this special feature are Liang Xiaoman’s essays “Disjointed Thoughts” and “Notes On Poetry”, both centred on her poetic practice. Their English translations are published here as well, together with the translation of “I Was Born into Cantonese”.
Photography and painting were also vital parts of Li-
ang Xiaoman’s creative life. From “Rainbow Train—The Liang Xiaoman Memorial Exhibition”, held this May, we have selected a number of her works together with accompanying texts for inclusion in this special feature.
This special feature also includes excerpts from the “City Headlines · Southern Poetry” column, originally published on 13 January 2024, namely “Camphorwood Poetics: A Complete Dialogue Record of ‘Contemporary Chinese Poetry’s Call for the Absolute Text’”. These form what we present here as “A Linguistic Landscape of the Present and the Future—Abridged Record of the Symposium on Liang Xiaoman’s Poetry”. In addition, we reprint material published on 13 June 2023 on the WeChat public Account “Qitan Taik”1 entitled “Poetry Is Chance: A Sharing Session on Liang Xiaoman’s Red’s Factorisation”. Together with the essays by Mr Du Peng and Ms Chen Chenxiang on the same collection, these pieces offer considerable reference value for understanding and studying Liang Xiaoman’s poetry.
The final piece in this collection, “We Exiles All Carry Memory—To Liang Xiaoman”, brings together eight poems written for her. Their authors are Liang Xiaoman’s dearest friends and companions in poetry; some of the works are gifts, others elegies. Gathered here, they form a collective act of remembrance.
In the course of editing this special feature and translating Liang Xiaoman’s writings, I came to feel with greater depth the truth of a sentence she set down at the close of “Notes On Poetry”: “ ‘To become a poet’ means not only the ‘other world’ I must build in this life, but also the calibration of all relationships—between myself and reali-
1 Translator’s note: Qitan 奇譚 means “strange tales” in Chinese.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
ty, between myself and others, and between myself and my own being.” In this sense, our reading and our translating are each in their way a dialogue with her, as though she had never left our side.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
I Was Born into Cantonese
Liang Xiaoman Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Atthe turn of the Renyin year,1 my mother caught a chill, and her old stomach ailment returned, more severe than ever. Two months of conservative treatment brought no relief; at last, surgery was decided upon, and she entered the Municipal People’s Hospital—what in childhood we called simply the Inpatient Department. (Her recovery after the operation was excellent.) During that time, I went often in and out of the hospital’s surgical wing, and when my errands were done, I would linger before the eighth-floor window, to take in the view that stretched around me.
In the direction of Muk Tau Lung, towers rise, their glass façades reflecting the sunset glow. The retreating light is spellbinding; even the sky takes on a subtle, shifting expression. A thought keeps circling back, insistent as a refrain: this is the place of my birth. Forty-nine years ago, in the maternity ward of the same hospital, my mother bestowed life upon me and carried me into the world.
Outside the hospital stands the city I have never left since the day of my birth. Half a century I have lived with it, half a century watching it shift with bewildering speed, which still startles me. Human will, tireless, compels time forward. According to Calvino’s perception of time, I was born in the city’s “negative time.” Back then it was called Bao’an County, my mother says. Pregnant with me, she followed my father, reassigned here for work. “It was no bigger than a palm,” she remembers. The county’s offices were gathered close around what is now Nanhu Street. East of Dongmen Road was desolation, west of Caiwuwei2 the same. That is how it imprinted itself on my childhood. Not long after I began primary school, one afternoon I waited to be collected, but no one from my family came. One by one my classmates drifted away until the yard was empty. Fear rose in me, and I set out alone.
1 Translator’s note: This is the year 2022 in Chinese cyclical calendar.
But I took the wrong gate. At once I was on Dongmen Middle Road. To my young eyes, nothing looked familiar. The roadway was bare, the surroundings vacant. Terrified, I walked on weeping.
My father was posted by the provincial personnel office to Bao’an County. At first, with no dwelling yet assigned, we lived in the county guesthouse. He reported first to the county government (its old seat stood roughly behind the Diwang Tower,3 where the city’s Public Security Bureau now rises), and only afterward to his own unit. My mother was very young then, coming from an island—her birthplace—into another stretch of coast. “In those days, Shenzhen was only a fishing village” (as the saying goes). Small as it was, it held the whole of my life, save for one breaking out that cast light across my childhood—“this dark house” (from my poem “Childhood”).
The sea—so dazzling. I may have been three or four, one summer afternoon, when I woke from sleep and my mother hurried me onto the bus. The journey was very long; we rode for what seemed forever before arriving. As soon as we stepped down, we were in a place wholly unknown: the pier, the fishermen, the sunlight so fierece it left me dazed, unable to keep my eyes open, the market in a clutter of din and disorder… And then—the sea: a memory awashed in light. All else has seeped and faded, but the scent endures, sharp and unforgotten—the briny, swelling sea, her dense breath enfolding me, never to depart.
My mother, young then, sincere and ardent with people, was well liked by all. If someone from her unit drove to Nantou to buy sea fish, they would call to her, and she would not forget to bring her daughter along. So it was that I came to my first impression of the sea. Yet I am troubled by doubt: where was my younger brother, two
2 Translator’s note: Caiwuwei 蔡屋圍 was the largest village in the area of Bao’an County. It has become the centre of Shenzhen city since the 1980s.
3 Translator’s note: Another name for this building is Dynasty Building. It was the tallest building in Asia when it was completed in March 1996.
years my junior? Why does this scene not hold him? The uncertainty of memory gives rise to poetry. Childhood is the part I love to recall, mingled always with invention—yet it stands most remote from the present, remote as though it were something on another planet.
I remember, and imagine, my childhood—my mother, young and honest-hearted, bearing a countrywoman’s curiosity, arriving in this far-flung place where only after layer upon layer of scrutiny could one put down roots. Except for her husband, she had no kin. Yet she did not count it hardship: she plunged headlong into life, though at the beginning, nothing ran smooth. They were young, newly arrived, knowing nothing of local affairs; but my father, proud of himself, solitary in temper, offended the clerks, and my mother’s household registration lay suspended for years… In the end it was people from our native place who intervened, and in a meeting of The Provincial Public Security Department the matter was resolved—a thing, to think of now, beyond belief.
In those years, migration was no common matter; wherever one went, an introduction letter was required. All the more so in Bao’an County—small in size, yet poised in a place of delicate balance: across the river is Hong Kong, the stronghold of capitalism. At night, when the villagers of the New Territories cooked their rice, the smoke drifted to the fishermen’s homes on this side. From old photographs I half-glimpsed the Luohu checkpoint of the 1970s: low, squat office buildings, armed police at their posts, the slow-crawling train. By chance I once saw a timetable of the Canton–Kowloon railway from 1912: from Shenzhen to Kowloon, the journey took thirteen hours. I think of my grandmother, born in Yaumatei, and how, in the 1920s, she must have ridden that slow, heavy train back inland. The year before last, doctors declared her, nearly ninety, was clsoe to her end. But I, bound by the epidemic, could not hasten to her side. In sorrow I
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
wrote a poem for her, “Samanea, Salamander and Mrs. Wu.” Yet she lived. Not only lived—she leapt back into life. Before the poem for my grandmother, I had written another—“Island.” It too was about her, and my mother as well.
In the past, the river that divided Hong Kong from Shenzhen curried furtive talk—whispers that stirred dark imaginings. At recess I would hear classmates say: again a body had been seen, drifting on the water… and such tales spread. My mother told me that in 1979 someone urged her to cross the river, but she could not bear to leave us. For many years, that river stood for misfortune. To think of it is to summon those young lives.
Though no one could cross to the far shore, all could see it, every detail. Around 1979, in Bao’an County—already renamed Shenzhen—many households began to own their first television sets, most in black and white, bought with foreign-exchange coupons. In the seventies and eighties, a household with a television became at once the centre of the community, where neighbours gathered daily, as if to clock in, to take their place before the screen.
I still remember childhood evenings after supper, when adults and children carried their stools, assembling as if for an open-air cinema. At the appointed hour the theme songs would rise—music by Joseph Koo, lyrics by James Wong. With ceremony we watched these dramas; they were the spine of our cultural life. Not long ago, Joseph Koo, far away in Canada, passed on. The simplified Chinese web—above all the Cantonese world—was filled with remembrance of him. After all, he was inseparable from our childhood memory.
From childhood on, all I watched, all I listened to, came from across the river: the television, the radio. Unlike the central media in its standard Mandarin, unlike the northern images it carried, what coursed in my blood was Cantonese—at first unnoticed, only later realised as essential.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
As sound, as image, it became the source of my poetry, my “original text” (Ouyang Jianghe).4 In my earliest memory I find one chapter: I was about four, perhaps five. Each day I was made to stand before my father and recite Du Fu’s poems in Cantonese. I did not grasp the meaning of the lines. Yet my father, by the old family rule—my grandfather had taught in a private school—held that poetry need only be learnt by heart, its meaning left aside. When the occasion arrived, the meaning would reveal itself.
Cantonese has its own intricacy and capaciousness. It radiates through the Pearl River Delta, yet it also draws in the golden age of Hong Kong and Taiwan television, and through that age, the Western values, elements, culture. As it absorbs what lies around it, it is borne outward still further, the force of the language extending beyond national borders. It has indeed the aspect of “the frog” (Lin Zhao),5 swallowing, exhaling, all things. In the 1980s, for instance, waves of Vietnamese refugees began to pour into Hong Kong. Each day on the news we saw them displaced, living before the camera—washing clothes, cooking, playing football, at games, at idleness… On the radio Vietnamese was broadcast daily. I still recall a few syllables, though never their meaning. After more than ten years of this close encounter between Vietnamese and Hong Kong Cantonese, I believe the two have long seeped into one another. As for Cantonese, I keep one habit still. I like to tell apart, in daily life, whether the speech I hear is Guangfu (with Guangzhou as its exemplar), or Hong Kong, or local. I am no linguist, cannot parse the distinctions in technical terms, but broadly I can tell—and I believe that each timbre is tied to a different local temperament.
From Bao’an County to today’s Greater Bay Area, forty-nine years have passed in a sweep. Unlike those poets who came to this city from elsewhere, it is not I who write Shenzhen, but Shenzhen that writes me. The city, with its singular geography, its mission, made me feel, from childhood, the ache of separation—yet also the lure of a different civilization, the summons of the other. There is a saying: when God closes one window, He opens another. The river that divided us was the shuttered window. Yet my mother tongue, Cantonese, once taking the whole world as its charge, was the window God opened to me. It is precisely this southernmost language that to the first poet born and raised here (in these forty-nine years she has looked around and has not seen another native poet of this “small fishing village/Shenzhen”) hinted at and pointed out her life’s destiny—to write poetry.
4 Translator’s note: The “original text” ( 原文 ) is a key notion of the poetics of the Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe.
5 Translator’s note: The frog is the leading character and narrator in Lin Zhao’s novel Map of Tides 潮汐圖 (2022) that features Cantonese cultural history in the 20th century.
Disjointed Thoughts
Each word carries with it a strange lineage. Each dream bears the destiny of a wanderer. Each body is no more than the birthplace of dreams.
*
The balance of ecologies—both natural and social— must begin with a re-examination of science’s root notions: even the very definition of the food chain. After watching the documentary The Cove, I found myself thinking that the dolphin is one of those beings with whom we humans ought to sit, as companions, at the same table.
Paz once said that poetry is another voice, pitched between religion and revolution. He took 1989 as a turning point of the age, a return for humankind. But I believe reality has already undone that hope. Before 1989, the world still stood in two camps of “good and evil”; the very presence of the evil camp gave idealism its ground, its logic. When the wall fell, the imagined enemy was lost, and from then on the world lay without distinction, blurred into sameness…
*
A master, too, is only human. The pain felt within each individual life ought never be drowned out beneath words like posterity’s glory or the pride of an age. One who bears intellect but no sensibility is no companion to keep.
*
All works of art that ask the viewer to summon intellect alone are to be boycotted.
*
Brodsky once said: “Aesthetics is the mother of ethics.” This is true. Only when a person knows what beauty is can there be genuine goodness. And conversely, true goodness
is itself a great beauty.
*
If time, like life, has a beginning and an end, then human society is no more than a summer insect. To move forward without cease—does it not also mean moving toward decline, toward disappearing, toward extinction? There is always a point in time that is most beautiful, worthy dwelling in. Of course, it is not the present.
*
To read is to plunder. Since it is theft in any case, let it be from the great houses. If we are to steal, then let it be the mightiest head in the world—let the strongest among us become our spiritual father.
*
In life there is no such thing as a “solid block of time”, there is only “time in fragments”. And the shape of time determines our shape of existence.
*
Lorca, it turns out, once fell in love with Salvador Dalí… Though I admire Dalí’s paintings, I cannot help but feel regret for Lorca’s taste.
*
There is an elegance called ignorance; there is an awkwardness called erudition.
*
At midnight I was startled awake by a dream. The “I” had become a phantom, ceaselessly overturned, undone. “I” met many people, spoke many words, did many things—and yet, in the end, there was always another “superego”, like a God above, presiding in judgement.
Liang Xiaoman Translated by Heidi Huang and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
*
A person always carries two identities: one is himself, the other is his onlooker.
*
The relationship of film to music is much like that of a women to her clothes. Music, within film, creates another layer of narration beyond the story itself. And the works of the great composers of film scores most often bear a forceful personal style. The most recognisable are Philippe and Calandero. The latter’s music for the Greek director Angelopoulos carries the very quality of poetry.
*
When the weather is fine, all the joys of life arrive together. Today, the sky is as pale as a bed sheet. I am its patient.
*
The merchant has no nationality.
*
Beneath our feet lies a ruin. And civilisation and virtue, are wrought by those who can brush the dust from their garments and rise untroubled, composed, upon the ruins.
*
A child’s inner world is a labyrinth, dwelling in a realm without form. As the days stretch on, labyrinth is built upon labyrinth, tier over tier, until it becomes an ancient, trembling makeshift edifice—an unauthorised structure.
*
At morning, the heart is glad; by evening, the heart is sorrowful. Between sorrow and gladness, a day slips swiftly away.
*
Even strangers do not trade in words of malice—how much less should friends? Those who walk the same path are friends; those who do not, simply part ways. At most mat is cut in two, but never should harsh words be spoken.
*
The freedom, the looseness, the openness of B-type people is built upon the foundation of a single wall. One wall is enough. It is the needle that steadies the sea, not the towering wall of a prison.
*
My maternal grandfather and my uncle both practised the martial arts; in their youth, each could stand alone against ten.
*
A poet is a messenger out of the forest.
*
Truth does not exist; only bearing is visible to all. A calm demeanour, a careful mind, a turn of phrase touched with humour—these are the basic elements that compose the charm of the modern man.
*
This is not a film, nor an episode of NYPD. This is real life, a real event. What price the unlucky car thief had to pay, I do not care to know. After the endless reenactments of life’s possibilities in film and other visual media, no one is interested in the “scene” itself. Or rather, it now takes a greater shock to make us realise that this is not a soap opera, not a photograph, but life itself—real people with real joys, angers, sorrows, and delights.
*
Some beautiful things are better kept in remembrance than brought into the fabric of daily life—love, for instance, and dreams.
*
The cold has come—best to go home early. When will the weather at last abandon its role as painter? The Londoners of Dickens’s time truly deserve our pity; no wonder so many serial killers arose from their midst.
*
Yes, music can set one free, even in the depths of a prison.
*
Most events that shape history show little sign of themselves at first. Their force strengthens only as they move and unfold, and it is later generations, in tracing back to the source, who make the discovery. Influence, socalled, is always belated. The so-called wisdom of a Zhuge Liang1 is, more often than not, a wisdom after the fact.
*
Life—each day is the raising of a white flag. Surrender, complete. To the masters, to the classics.
*
Someone once said to the French writer Sagan: you are the only woman in Paris who never buys clothes. It brings to my mind my own oddity of much the same degree, and for the same reason as Sagan’s: it is, in truth, a tedious and trifling affair.
*
It is said that Balzac feared photography. Those who still share such dread, of course, are the peoples of less developed places. For us, grown within a postmodern society built on images and the internet, photography is the most ordinary of things, like language, like the automobile, like the painter’s brush. Only by returning ourselves to the nineteenth century can we feel more deeply what photography truly meant: possession, estrangement, and the surreal.
*
Poetry reveals the writer’s thoughts; the novel, the writer’s imagination. But prose discloses the writer’s temperament—and prose without temperament is like meat fried without salt.
*
When a woman grows willful, and no way is left for
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
her to retreat, she must carry it on; otherwise her pride is imperiled.
*
The world is changing so swiftly. May it be that when I reach sixty, the young will not regard me as some prehistoric creature.
* All injustice has its root in dishonesty.
*
To disregard public opinion and shape it instead with one’s own knowledge and intellect may indeed be taken as a mark of the intellectual’s independence. Yet caution is needed: can you be certain that what you say is truly correct? And such correctness cannot be confined to the present moment; it must be weighed against the future— against what we now call, in the fashionable phrase, humanity’s sustainable development.
*
Only in discovering within natural things their unseen, inner form of art can one glimpse the photographer’s eye. Photography should be the author’s gaze drawing the viewer toward the work.
*
A poet must first possess a free soul. For the poet—and for every other artist—there is the measure of good or bad, never the measure of morality.
*
Literature exists because there is so much forgetfulness in age. Without writing, how could we withstand oblivion?
*
When a person dies, it is even a headache for the dead—how the memorial should be held, whom to invite,
1 Translators’ note: Zhuge Liang was the famed counsellor to Liu Bei, the founder of the Shu-Han dynasty. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he is portrayed as a master of war and wisdom, endowed with powers beyond the mortal realm, serving as both civil and military adviser to Liu Bei. He appears ever a few steps ahead of his foes, his foresight weaving the course of battle. The novel gives to him the gift of the supernatural, showing him as one who can summon the wind and discern the shape of the days to come.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
whether to announce every detail of the final days, whether to open all of one’s information to the public, including the chief social ties. At the thought of such things, I would rather not die at all.
* When my thoughts take shape in the form and language of poetry, I feel they have found their dwelling in this world. As when a woman wears a dress that fits her, as when a man lies in the arms of his lover.
* Without knowing death, how can one know life?
*
Form is essence. The face of a poet is the interpretation of his verse.
* I would to be one of the Na’vi, living on the planet Pandora.
* Love is exhausting. Without training, one lacks the constitution for it: the pulses too slow, the muscles weak, the emotions altogether too steady.
2nd January 2010 V
Notes about Poetry
1
Formany years, I have returned, again and again, to a certain scene—a river in the city, a broad pavement at its side where southern trees are planted in rows, their heavy shade a canopy beneath the ashen sky; birds rise from within, and on the roadway people and vehicles scatter thinly. Where is this place, and why am I there? My heart is blank, I press my thoughts in vain, and no answer comes—like a nightmare where reality and vision refuse to part.
This memory, through many years, resurfaces unbidden, leaving me confused, unable to determine whether it is real or fictional. It is as though, at dawn, the violet sea shifts with a faint trembling, rushing repeatedly against the naked feet. Should you gaze on it too long, all around you begins to waver, to crack apart. Here, I speak of a quality of poetry, yet also of a quality of image—the poet writes for the age he inhabits, for the plight of humankind, and at the same time longs to set within the act of reading that temporal sense of déjà vu.
This trance holds you fast, yet casts you at once into the sea, water on every side. If one were to ask what poetry is, each dusk might yield a different reply, as varied as the forms of twilight, as profuse as the voices of birds. Poetry, at times, makes us question reality.
2
I only began writing poetry at thirty-five, which feels a little late, but I have never been one of precocity. I move at my own slow, often absent-minded rhythm. In fact, Dickinson was already thirty-two when she first submitted her poems, so in the ranks of late-blooming poets, I am not alone.
Each person is a span of time and space within the universe, and at the source of that span lies childhood. Our
earliest experiences shape the ways we relate to ourselves, the world, and the cosmos. My parents often loved to recall one particular incident from my infancy, which also happens to be my very first visual memory. From the time I was born until I was two, my younger aunt lived with us to help my mother care for me, and we became deeply attached. On the day she left, I wept and would not be consoled, clinging to the hem of her dress in the street, refusing to let her go—until my mother pointed out a yellow wildflower by the roadside. At once my attention shifted; I ceased crying, and stood quietly, the blossom held tight in my hand as I watched my beloved aunt leave…
The source of my poetry is a “cosmos” that is multi-layered, intricate, and complex. The word cosmos comes from the ancient Greek Kosmos, whose original meaning is “harmony, order”, set in contrast to its counterpart Chaos, disorder. I once believed that the wellspring of my own experiences contained nothing but doubt and pain, loss of control and defeat. Within them were mingled the cadences of Du Fu and Li Bai; the self-abasement of lacking any gift for mathematics; the loneliness of never owning a single doll; the shame, unease, and shrinking of a little girl in a vast and alien adult world, like a pangolin cowering; the violence and hatred that accumulated and dissolved in secret, along with desire and delusion; and, most enduring of all, the imagined world that sheltered my childhood like a castle—a world that was primal and intense, infinitely close to reality and happiness, yet utterly fictitious, forever pierced by reality with its fear, loss, anger, and sorrow…
I thought it could only be Chaos—it gave birth to three deities—yet a yellow wildflower by the roadside also belongs to that source. It soothed the pain and stilled the cries. More than thirty years later, it gave rise to the late-blooming poetry of a late-blooming poet.
It is violence and the flower together that form the order of a complete life, that constitute the Kosmos—the universe in which we dwell, fashioned both of ourselves
Liang Xiaoman Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Heidi Huang
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and of our desires. It condenses into the poetics of genesis and of apocalypse, and every poet is its “innocent desire, like the serpent’s fruit”, an Odyssey drifting towards the supreme fiction.
3
Agamben said, “We therefore need to consider the incomprehensible as an exclusive acquisition of Homo sapiens, and the unsayable as a category that the ineffable belongs solely to human language.”1 In the real world, where for me understanding is inseparable from sensing, poetry—whether through the unconscious or through consciousness—was once renewed by Agamben.
Poetry may be understood as “a drifting toward the boundaries of language”. To draw infinitely near to the boundary is to draw infinitely near to a presence, a thing, that is “unsayable”, “incomprehensible”. The poet lingers on the way towards silence; the highest poetry is that which comes closest to the “unsayable”, the “incomprehensible”.
How can we distinguish “existence” from “thing”? Under what conditions does the “thing” slip away from “existence” and become a pure “thing”? And can “existence,” ultimately, ever detach itself from its relation to the “thing,” and be grasped and expressed by humankind?
The poet seeks to extract from herself a single “I”—the steady I, the perceiving I—composed of countless shattered selves, forever in the making. The poem, too, emerges from countless broken words, and it, too, is forever in the making.
It strives to release the deepest, most extreme voice within the human heart, a voice that thunders in the silence. For every word it must reach, each sound forces the poet’s heart to relive, again and again, the ordeal of Sisyphus.
So too with the future of human nature. The relation of technology to human nature is as the relation of word to poem.
Technology is bound to alter human nature. When people live eternally like the gods, will they still possess
the divinity sung by Homer or Virgil? Wantonness, pettiness, envy, caprice, frailty… these belong to human nature, not to divinity. But is human nature truly, as myth and science fiction suggest, something that can never perish?
It depends on what kind of technological future we shall possess, and the reverse is also true. The future of technology depends as well on the reality of human nature. A poem depends on the words that compose it and the manner of their composition, and the reverse is also true. The functional relation between human nature and technology sends our future forth from the past, then draws it back from the future, like a subway train coursing through a Möbius strip. Schrödinger’s cat is also a kind of destiny of poetry.
In a future where human nature has vanished, how shall we write poetry? Will emotion perish with the passing of human nature? It is said that “one of the functions of poetry is the revival of emotion”—how, then, shall the poet of the future write a post-human poem?
Will the poet of the future also receive a message—uncertain whether it issues from his future or his past—and be drawn once more into the ranks of revolution, determined to bring the “revival of humanity”?
Will that too be a kind of awakening? When after awakening there is no further path to awakening, will humanity return to the poetry of pre-sapient humankind? Perhaps that is the ultimate truth yet to be revealed—for after all, we have never truly known what “human” is.
4
Time is non-linear.
The time we now perceive is a time lagging behind in technology. Before technology transforms the future of human nature, it must first transform our perception of time. If the poet’s eye could see with clarity the frequency of a hummingbird’s wing-beat within the span of a single second, then we should behold the rainbow of gravity and time’s omnipresence.
The boundaries and directions of time have vanished. All sounds released at the same time cancel one another,
1 Translators’ note: This quote is from Giorgio Agamben. What is Philosophy? Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford University Press 2017. Page 43.
and the poet falls into a great silence. Time has disappeared. What the poet feels is at once this moment, the past and the future, as the bird beyond the window gives forth its cry of birth and death.
5
I recall two lines of Hölderlin translated into Chinese by Liu Haoming—2
And purpose of poets in an age of darkness?
Yet you say they are like the priests of the wine god, Moving from place to place in the sacred night.
–- translated by David Lehman
After the outbreak of the epidemic in January 2020, some said we had entered a new epoch. I do not know whether we can return to the past—I mean ten years ago, twenty years ago. The plague hastened the turning of the age—the resounding crash of the gates clanging shut was weighty beyond measure. Out of despair some gave a cry and climbed the tall buildings; others, hair dishevelled, chased after ambulances in tears... A great calamity can strip something from the human heart. Sustained by reading Virgil and Hölderlin, I endured the darkest days at the beginning of the epidemic and renewed my understanding of poetry.
If I agree with Rimbaud’s claim—he wrote in a letter, “I think the poet must a seer, make himself a seer”3—then what else may the poet be, apart from a seer, one who, as Hölderlin declared, communes directly with the gods? I imagine that most would not, in our present context, endorse placing such emphasis on the poet as “seer”. Here, the central tensions are most often cast as “recluse” versus “engaged”, “everyday” versus “lyric”. A Gnostic current of mysticism, once detached from the Western poetic tradition steeped in religion, seems incapable of transplanting itself into another culture where poets have long borne the task of moral instruction.
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Prophecy is a truth that is ceaselessly fulfilled. The oracle of Apollo’s temple—“Man, know thyself”—holds true in every age. The poet can only be one who turns towards essence: she must first knows herself, then others, and then the world. Prophecy is brought to realisation through knowledge.
The poet is also one bound to language, which is at once the only thing she can redeem and the very means by which she herself is redeemed. The prophetic power of poetry resides first of all in its language. Every poem that is written is a speech turned towards essence, a divided speech, which through the form of poetry may be gathered once more into a whole—an abstract, essential language. This cyclical, double nature of poetry is itself is a prophecy of the world, ceaselessly fulfilled.
Rivers always return to the sea, and poetry itself is prophecy.
6
My impulse to write springs chiefly from personal experience, and from the social realities that press about me. The reality of politics, the reality of the human condition. The reality of history and the reality of what lies before us. And the shifting climate, the natural world and its alternation of man’s condition stir alike my vigilance and unease, which too I have woven into poems.
I find it hard to discern who has had the greatest influence upon my writing of poetry. I agree with T.S. Eliot’s ideas on poetics, while Neruda and Wallace Stevens were among the first poets I read, yet it is undoubtedly Chen Dongdong with whom I am most familiar, both in person and his writing. Moreover, I firmly believe that the years of translating poetry will, in time, imperceptibly shape a poet’s own writing.
It is neither wise nor possible to speak of one’s own poetry. It is precisely because it cannot be spoken of that the poet has set it down in the form of a poem. For example,
2 Translators’ note: These Chinese lines are from the original text from Liang Xiaoman’s essay. The English translation is located by us.
3 Translators’ note: This line is taken from Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, dated 15 May 1871. Originally written in French, it is rendered here in English as: “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.”
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if someone were to ask about the meaning of the “ear” in my poem “Ear”, what I can say is this: the meaning of the “ear” as I conceived it in this poem is contained within the poem itself.
Leaving aside the poem, it is possible to speak of the ear. First, it is a noun, pointing with great clarity to an organ of the human body. This organ is an instrument of hearing, receiving the passage of sound waves, endowed with the function of discerning vibration. All living beings that possess ears—humans among them—depend upon this organ for their communication. It makes language possible. Not long ago I went to the cinema to rewatch the film Avatar. The intelligent species on that distant planet have a pair of huge ears; their communion with the gods takes place through sound, sounds whose meaning humans cannot discern.
My hearing has always been poor, especially when it comes to distinguishing human speech. Once, I found myself caught amidst two women chatting casually. I made no effort to follow what they were saying, but they kept talking, and my wandering mind began to wonder: what language was theirs? English? Spanish? Then, in a sudden flash, I realised—they were speaking my own mother tongue, Cantonese.
Yet many of my poems spring from sound—sound that arises within the chambers of my own consciousness. If my ear is dull in receiving the voices of the outer world, it may be all the keener in catching those within. It is a silent sound. The sound of poetry.
7
From Zen Buddhism to painting, there has since ancient times the saying of Northern and Southern schools. Dong Qichang designated as Southern the literati paintings of ink and wash, thinned and dissolved, where spirit was prized above skill. To draw such a clear boundary was indeed to invent a way of seeing, and it cannot be denied that it also embodied the worldly structures of discursive
power. Yet the South is truly a spiritual dimension distinct from the North. Not long ago I visited Quanzhou, where I listened to a performance of Nanyin, 4 songlike and weeping, resentful and imploring, of immense artistic allure. Might contemporary poetry of the South also be discerned in this way? It carries a feminine quality and a delicate, intricate craft, a voice that is personal, a voice that is sensuous.
In recent years, as I have spent more time living in Jiangnan, 5 a sense of “China”—and an understanding of it—has been rebuilt within me, reconnecting with the imagination of history. Amid today’s tide of globalisation, I can still glimpse, in the daily lives of many Jiangnan people, traces of an older China. From daily food and dwelling to the arrangement of the household, ornaments within rooms, paintings and calligraphy upon the walls, the weekend custom of burning incense at temples, drinking tea and conversing at leisure, as well as the music and theatre of the guqin and pingtan, with their many devoted audiences—people here live within Jiangnan culture. In this place, there is also a deeper understanding of modern poetry and of poets. For over a century, the word “West”, together with the derivative ideas it carries, has seeped into our consciousness without cease, shaping how we understand the world, even becoming a standard of measure. its counterpart, the word “East”, has over the same century taken on richer meanings. The relationship between East and West has become the ground from which we narrate history and comprehend ourselves. Jiangnan, and more broadly the culture of the Yangtze, forms a vital part of Eastern culture. It belongs not only to us, but from earliest times has radiated outward to neighbouring lands. It has created for human civilization some of its loftiest arts—classical Chinese poetry, landscape painting, and calligraphy. After the Ming and Qing dynasties, Jiangnan became the new heartland of China’s poetry, painting, and calligraphy.
8
4 Translators’ note: Nanyin, which literally means “Music of the South”, is one of the most ancient musical art forms in China.
5 Translators’ note: Jiangnan literally meaning “south to the Yangzi River”. It is a geographic area in China referring to lands immediately to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, including the southern part of the its delta.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
We live in an age of severe ecological destruction. Sea and land alike are grievously polluted, glaciers are melting, cities lie shrouded in smog, and refuse heaps have no place to rest. Faced with such stark reality, my poetry, like that of other poets, can scarcely avoid expressing anxieties about the ecological crisis. I have written poems such as “Nanjing”, “November”, “Homesickness”, “The Twilight in My Blood is Yours, Too”, all of which are, in truth, poetic responses to ecological issues: “… in this kind of place, polluted scenery billows towards us/ and you must read it out” (“Nanjing”);6 “now plastic prevails, plastic feeding bottles, plastic dolls / homo plasticus - molecules of plastic invade our veins and brains” (“November”).7 Ecopoetry has emerged as ecology has become a component of people’s ideology; the ecological crisis is a bitter fruit of modern industrial society. Ecopoetry does not necessarily turn to mountains and waters: in “Nanjing” I write of a city under smog. This marks the difference in subject between ecopoetry and poems about landscape; the scope of the former is an extension of the latter. As for poems of mountains and waters, from Tao Yuanming to Frost they broadly belong to a romantic lyrical tradition, using scenery to voice emotion, borrowing mountains and rivers to express feeling. The landscape serves as an object of depiction, yet it also carries the poet’s self: when “gazing, the two never tire of each other”, both self and landscape are forgotten, entering the realm of the Way. Therefore, most landscape nature poems bear an aesthetic or religious function of delight and enlightenment, whereas ecopoetry bears more awareness of peril.
9
My poetry comes directly from sound, to borrow the words of a certain bard from the ancient times: “The gods pour song into my heart…”. In my writing, there is little of the so-called spur of the moment inspiration, stirred by scenery or circumstance. It is not the improvisation of daily life, but the voice of past and present experience return-
ing to consciousness after passing through the depths of the subconscious. It is what Eliot called “a concentration of experience”, and what Tranströmer described as “the dream awake”. In other words, behind what is called spontaneity lie memories and experiences still awaiting their awakening. My writing in the past (and in the present) still comes from the “messenger of mysterious messages” (Bei Dao). But what moves me is not only a consciousness of my own personal history, but also an awareness of the future.
There is no poetry detached from thought; once a poem comes into being, it carries its own thought. Perhaps what we are speaking of is the question of poetry’s engagement, but that belongs to the realm of “stance” rather than of “thought”. The relation between thought and poetry cannot be understood as that between content and form, for they are of a single body, sharing their origin in the poet’s self-consciousness. When that self-consciousness grows strong enough, his (or her) thought is poetry, and poetry is thought. I do not set thought apart from poetry in order to ponder its meaning. As a poet, I am always concerned with how to write both my body of poems and each single poem well—what the significance of writing a poem may be, whether it is necessary to the whole of my work, whether it can serve as a “developed negative” with myself, with the world.
Line breaks, stanza divisions, and punctuation are crucial in the writing of poetry, for they shape its rhythm, mark the distinction between stresses and lighter tones, and so on. From the outset my writing has been devoted to exploring these aspects. I have written many poems purely as experiments in rhythm and form, such as my early poem “Tuberculosis”, which attempted a structural invention: at the end of the first stanza it points the reader towards a labyrinth: (“turn to the third stanza”)—an effort to disrupt, and at the same time to reconstruct, the poem’s natural lineation and stanza divisions, forcibly introducing a Borgesian circular maze. It breaks into the poem’s inner time like a bull in a china shop, but veers outward into space like a derailed train. This is one example of my ear-
6 Translators’ note: This line is from the English translation by Benjamin Orion Landauer.
7 Translators’ note: This line is from the English translation by Cui Yixiong.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
ly writing. Seen from today’s perspective, I consider the poem unsuccessful, and for this reason I did not include it in the collection System Error.
On the use of line breaks, stanza divisions, and punctuation, different poems have different considerations; these are shaped by intuition, and they are also adjustments made to suit circumstances so as to meet the poem’s own needs. For example, in the poem “System Error”, the repetition of the final three lines and the ellipsis both have clear expressive purpose and intent. Yet once, someone was reading this poem, they came to the ending “Poetry is a system error”, read it only once and stopped; thus the poem’s expression suffered.
I have indeed formed some habits in exploring my own tone and voice, but in the poems to come, they may alter still.
“To become a poet” means not only the “other world” I must build in this life, but also the calibration of all relationships—between myself and reality, between myself and others, and between myself and my own being.
Written in 2021 at Jianshan8 Study V
8 Translators’ note: Jianshan literally means “seeing mountain”. This study of Liang Xiaoman and Chen Dongdong is in the flat they lived together in Shenzhen. It got its name because of the window view of the mountains. It also refers the famous Zen saying: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." This saying, attributed to Zen Master Qingyuan Weixin and Dōgen, describes the three stages of spiritual insight in Zen Buddhism.
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
Twenty-Two Poems by Liang Xiaoman
Translated
by Benjamin
Orion Landauer, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, and Chris Song
Homesickness
a heavy mist falls my father’s hand reaches out to me from 1933, and in the transfigured wind slowly disappears— village magic ceases to evolve soil, the river’s flow, wild creatures slowly disappear—
gods above ancestors below the living, in vain, go on living
May 2010
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
a slender figure walks by his arm unusually long supporting an even longer lens that reaches into the starry sky night lies bare nameless insects moan the abstract desire of the desert makes the concreteness of travel unbearably weary
slipping towards sleep, a silent caravan waits for the signal to depart the city in the shadows, an astrolabe reorders the order of things
2011
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
Aswan
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Jiaochangwei, Shenzhen
setting out by car from Dameisha to the left of the highway, barren mountains to the right, a pale, glittering sea we pass through E’gongling Tunnel hardly a car along the road hardly a person at Jiaochangwei, either we walk between the sea and half-shuttered inns their walls painted blue, white, pink dogs doze on stoops no cats. nobody greets us nobody bothers us, either we wander aimlessly into a native village bars, inns, seafood stalls pass a wooden sign marked “Romance Hotspot” we arrive before the sea Winter—dismal, gloomy the sea, too, dull and listless we raise our index and middle fingers pose for cute pictures, as if to prove that winter and sea, and we ourselves undeniably exist
16 January 2017
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
Ring one pale dawn i came upon poems written seven years ago “seize those silvery fish, fashion them into a ring for a young girl” this very moment, upon my finger rests a ring bestowed by a man— a mineral drawn from the earth’s deep strata a crystal glinting with the light of snowflakes it encircles my ring finger, which with age grows thinner, the ring often slips, and needs my other hand to adjust its position this ring symbolises love, the merchant said, it represents a firm bond attests to a partnership, even to fidelity, to beauty, to eternity and yet, too many have died for it miners, emaciated beneath the gun black-market traders with bloodied hands men and women who, having possessed it find themselves sleepless bizarre murders, tabloid headlines smugglers who believe concealment (including the meanings they ascribe to it) ensures safety. Adulterers, novices imitating the adept slip off their rings beforehand, hide them— just as travellers long ago learnt the loopholes in the rules for checked luggage between my fingers a light like snowflakes glimmers and it recalls to me the self of seven years past who once, among silvery fish saw a ring, and a young girl
15 November 2017
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
Tokyo
a train cuts the sky between Tokyo’s towers the sky, too, is mirrored in the train that threads through towers by my ear, film-sounds resound my listening posture like a bird falling from the clouds, awaiting the storm’s signal
between the viaduct tracks, faces remain impassive gestures solemn, avoiding the meeting of eyes as one avoids the nearing rain, avoids the vivid blaze of lightning, clinging instead to sashimi without salt and a marriage without savour they dwell beneath the trains, above the towers rouge and perfume exact, everything just right
i think of Yōko, head bowed, listening, waiting for a child to arrive; with the silence of a low bird, its wings broken, she measures the decibels of train after train cutting through the towers measures his heart and his desire… yet how improper it is for husband and wife to speak of love
the sky darkens, the trains and towers secure their proper resonance. from that resonance, thunder brings a shockwave fierce enough to shatter this emptiness
November 2017
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
Nanjing
a compressed volume of time spits you out from its vast belly a new dynasty dawns on the horizon beneath steel-framed eaves a grey-white landscape spreads
the appointed vehicle is slow to arrive the one to receive you is trapped on the floor of parting we need a love that is dangerous…
to illuminate this moment, to rouse song—the singer’s lyric heart brings us back into that cave of the Holy Cross a lick of flame, tattered pages opened time intoned in silence; a winter night covering silver hair not yet fallen
all this is love calling to love song giving birth to song frost feeling frost years bid adieu to years. the trace of a new dawn is being sketched by the grey scenery how many memories slumber at the lake’s floor?
this moment, you recall a Red-whiskered Bulbul and dangerous love… that desolation, that solitude faraway things bestow on your poetry in a time like this in this kind of place the landscape of smog surges towards us and you must speak it out
31 December 2017
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
Pain for F—
a little bird buried alive in gravel the shrill laughter of boys circling overhead like the roar of heavy machinery drawing near you look at the younger you— our genes belong to the same family somber silence, the earliest pain many years later, a blazing fire is extinguished; on his tranquil face you cannot see the slightest trace of regret we all once longed like this for radiant stars to rise from a pallid, gloomy room
2018
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
The Twilight in My Blood is Yours, Too
Gloom Country has fully occupied the territory iron hooves, carts, panicked neighs resound across the wilderness, dense drums reverberating my organs yearn to leap from that cliff Gloom Country has fully occupied the territory
corpses litter the desert the setting sun has already encircled us the smoke of gunpowder in my blood is yours, too these bones, flesh, lymph nodes, retinas, failing organs—
so that tree roots may grow so that springs may flow so that birds may carve the sky so that the soil will be blackened no more—
the twilight in my blood is yours, too
2018
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
System Error
before speaking of this, could you be released from yourself just like lifting a saddle from a horse the self is a relatively primitive processor, occasionally hindering you from taking on more complex tasks with it, we can resolve life’s basic problems when the body suffers malaise we can go to the hospital on our own conduct simple exchanges purchase daily necessities stimulate consumption, and from this acquire a measure of dopamine, which helps us to carry a cheerful heart to approach the opposite sex, arrange dates and under the moderate influence of alcohol to copy for god its serial number before we begin to speak, let us first upgrade this processor facing the bathroom mirror the double image is the code running you embrace yourself as though embracing a stranger, you cannot feel love, you cannot feel desire at this moment, let us begin the discussion, what is love?
love is the path one must take towards the end what is the end?
the end is the code god has written for you how does one love the another? By helping him reach the end then, what is death?
death is the repair of the system what is poetry?
poetry is a system error what is poetry?
poetry is a system error what is poetry?
poetry is a system error…
2018
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
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Virtual World
coming out of the dim room, for a moment you sought the cry of a mysterious black bird, one that often alights on the small path you take a southern tree among the plantings emits a hoarse call, and your heart trembles for it
it comes from the virtual world…
dreams are like giant rocks pressing on your body you are roused by a sense of searching, but cannot hear the black bird’s call it almost exists, you’ve essentially grasped it draw back the curtains, the playground is empty, there are a few high-rises a column to the left, and for three days now, the sky has not brightened, like the quilt padding the bottom of a storage box
queries abound …
in the fogged mirror is a face and body you cannot recognise where has the body hair gone, those long ears, red eyes, the bulging belly an oval torso—that inner vision was realised countless times by a voice issuing from the chest, after all
you are a master of deception …
Translated by Benjamin Orion Landauer
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
in the sacred night from one place to another they migrate
In the sacred night from one place to another they migrate —Hölderlin
the elephants breaking from thicket are her rage no hand of hers can wrest the mysterious pearl
Purposeless mounts the ruined tower, rides a white cloud falls into the sea of thirty-two years ago
maize crushed underfoot, the television flickers black and white
in the hush of the mysterious pearl, elephants and herds gather, migrate, roam in the night in the dense forest of night the straw-elephant stands setting the elephants’ departure in heedlessness
the great sea is lost to the pearl, summer’s herd moves north. Along the splendour of the road love and grief pull the watchers springs no longer murmur by the ear after the last flare of dusk is gone amid the elephants’ waiting there sounds not the promised birdsong the heart wrapped in fat limbs sapped, powerless the eyes clouded, blurred her elephant grown old, forgetting falls into the nether-void never having seen the northern sea— though her anger long since reached it
June 2021
Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
dunes
dragging our suitcases and our bodies grown weighty after the winter’s first damp dispersed we stepped out from Jiashan Road Station
ten thousand years withdrawn from the dim cinema yet dunes remain, spices, people an emperor reigning over a boundless empire—
the heart stays so small, marriage arranged to match inheritance and politics— people never slips free of the order
walking along Zhaojiabang Road, the knights trapped on all sides within the system— they eat standing, helmets on
we in single file, speaking of yesterday the same place, the woman boards the bus the same call, the same words spoken
Borges offered her a dune in the round charlatans, thieves, actors, or the idle, perhaps a malady
still the same impasse: no stepping beyond the system each day wheels back into a day already spent that Asahi Shimbun call must occur in the self-same place, carriage packed with duplicate faces bus arriving to the second, unerring—a dune’s dream, enclosing you and me the future, dreaming within the dune, has already dreamt the past. The past: the dune’s shadow. At times it brings cinnamon, at times the distant scent of blood
one behind the other, bodies heavy with rain we spoke keenly of the Bastille—never of plague, nor that building cordoned by the white suits
July 2017
Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
cicada meditation
—a playful poem for Dongdong
if you ask me, Zhang Zao just rambles away trivia to a master as crab’s shell scraps to the galaxy—our ideals are architects of earth, on the skin of the soil where vast creations rise: that far-off, sublime rain tree, its roots in Africa— kin to the migrating matrix of flamingos once meeting colossal beings of ancient times— tyrannosaur, leviathan—enough to forge for you and me phantom foe—even as it turns away its shadow lingers, cast in dream-machinery an age of total-remodelling augmented reality, enough to net the moon from the desert, to water our steads in the Milky Way Kublai Khan rides his eagles through the cult of home improvement
within the cicada’s husk, a dry landscape garden dying each season, and rising again
December 2021
Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
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riding night, cradling a cloud’s brief history
—for Zang Di
In eternal silence, stirrings begin —Zang Di
was it we who roused the night, or the reverse? fate binding her in twin universes—perhaps more thunder of imagining in imagined time past rider of night, cradling a cloud—where are you placed?
human being is, after all, a relation when you seek her place, she collapses into Lethe the never-to-be-reached future— yet pain is its antonym it surges on toward us, an unceasing flood
the rain-breath of the dead seeps through us as though the forecast were forecasting—
tides of cold and warm commanded by El Niño might we still fashion a wooden boat? A sacred bird to a sacred tree?
night is so weary, coming and going rider of night, cloud-cradler, unremembering after thunder—shall we depart to hear the cry that never rang through earth? may the unbegun future return once again?
12 September 2023 Among clouds.
Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature beetle
a nocturnal beetle’s graceful poise does not mean the armoured legions dormant in the dungeon will not return— to demand a bride, a girl in gestation her unreadable fate shifting in the star-chart
we have long since lost that paradise of bliss, and in the night-march with delicate rhetoric, tempered tones, a black-armoured legion pushes through borderlands and mist, reaches the dreamland of dispersal and, in the guise of a noble envoy, demands a bride
so none can refuse; from the cocoon they choose the daughter destined for banishment if this be a crime, it is the empire of beetles decreeing it—
tens of millions of eggs must hatch
if this be a marriage, then the daughter yet to wake will be cast to shadowed plains or towering mountains—and if need be, from this day forth her neck will carry another chain to continue the royal bloodline
17 February 2022
Translated by Chris Song
poet
—for C
if I could I would push aside time and return to you Mozart’s laurel I want to know what it tastes like— to love you more than I do now I may never know you again though I know the deer in the woods the stream among stones, the vast silence of winter— all of them, another you
2024
Translated by Chris Song
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
ball lightning
A strange figure falls—like a rare harvest, a rare fruit.
—Raúl Zurita
from the permafrost the Reaper sets out, masked the twin bears’ faces are swollen, pale, their gaze dark on a southern set, a few actors appear, slung with AK-47s, singing along the way. Night’s meteors rehearse
another special operation, saluting the Olympics, Heil Führer, Vita Activa—the auspicious beast clenches in its jaws yet another ball of lightning, its spinning kernel turning nucleic acids positive. Genesis forced into another seven-day round
Mariupol’s bells toll: what night is this, what night? before the television, the twin bears’ world-hating eyes look afar
hands plump with collagen caress a red thunderball copying its ancestor: alone upon a mountain peak
is it solitude, or thin air? the geomancer of the permafrost points toward a city fallen on the horizon, another
blazing night-pearl, now imprisoned, suspended in the heart of Hades, the underworld’s mirage
Orpheus, pluck again your seven-stringed lyre; you will lose your loved one, the figure in the mirror swells, while the continent is far too small—only seven days are needed; let us make a new world, look here, in my hand
the brightest pearl: lightning, thunder, the hunger for a single nuclear blaze, submitting to nothingness, all it takes is to press its spinning kernel
far away, its brother beats its chest— darling, don’t weep, all will be well
April 2022
Translated by Chris Song
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
untitled
—for Dongdong, remembering a journey to Qingdao
tile upon tile, shoals of surgeonfish, sharp-tailed, chase the tide plunge into the sea. One hand holds another—thinner, more withered a body descending, climbing the slope of Zhengyang Pass on the island stand pines, phoenix trees, broadleaf woods hollyhocks bloom, spilling into the Naval Garden
since the year of Jiawu, no victory— yet we are gods of garden-making
the garden may host all things: from scholar’s rocks, streams run downward dusk light, fish and water, shift minds to a song of clouds
cloud-song without end, crater without end endless the wandering, endless the gardens—
what ends are our hands as I draw away, breath quickens, dusk falls into birds vanishing through my alliteration—
15 July 2024
Translated by Chris Song
black berries
the lost boatman sits forgetting—stars fall, mountain ridges drift with cloud consumption coughs its brittle music, the gathering crows sing their parting song
feathers whiten with snow, black berries crowd the hillsides once I too had climed to pluck the children of myrtle
in a quantum storm the girl’s song leaps in transition on the crater of simulation, the android flickers
summer winds pierce the walls, unfeeling pear blossoms fall upon a single robe the breath of humankind wavers, the android grows dazed
the system is rebooting— and again it is a heavy, oppressive Sunday
innocent fledglings cry, the cloud capsizes in the boundless wilderness only the stars reply
silent digits fill the eye of the universe the android is lost among the signs of love and death
she presses return, again and again, listening intently in slumber she longs to cast off skyward song
the lost boatman, nowhere to go, sings from his heart poisonous black berries grow rampant upon her, yet across the ages the android hears her— her final poem, her song of love
March 2024
Translated by Chris Song
unbound berries
dusk’s hand clutches a fist of purple berries offers them as you sleepwalk, where the songbird vanishes
A New Line of Poetry: The Liang Xiaoman Special Feature
basalt face molten, river beyond river, the cloud rows back by boat unbound cloud, you take it—unbound berries
electromagnetic waves circle the crater, chant of unbound verse the mysterious cosmos pulses, leaps on photons back and forth empty chamber mirrors itself—where are you?— the sky-arc slides to the other side tattooed phantoms surge, unbound cloud seeks to shed bytes gnaw the waist; you take them—berries of death hands in metamorphosis—at one time birdcall of the wild at one time fig of the peach-stream—turn them slow
crimson-violet bells, a bewildered song again rises calling the wanderer back from clouded shallows homeward
from another cosmos’ hand berries spill to the ground future folk are trapped in the song of the past
unbound cloud rows back by boat, again and again, the timeless cosmos the empty synapse is your hand reaching for mine
its whole life carried off by egrets
10 January 2022
Translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Inscribed: Notes Toward a Reparative Imagination
In 2024, I arrived in Saarbrücken as an invited research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation. Ours was the inaugural cohort, composed of scholars and artists. One studied reparations claims and memory work in Namibia; another traced silences in fragile private archives of resistance from Guinea; and a third examined the restitution of books and cultural objects displaced across Europe by centuries of war and appropriation. One artist, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, worked with black smoke as a medium of healing, charcoal breath tracing the silhouettes of ancestors. My own research explored reparation through cultural memory, visual media, and poetry, with a focus on Hong Kong. It situated the city within Chinese and Asian contexts while also charting its paradoxical role in global cultural practices—at once highly visible and persistently misrecognised. Immersed in this gathering, I began to understand reparation not only as a legal demand but as a cultural practice: alive in archives, rituals, art, and the smallest acts of everyday life.
Globally, reparation remains a pluriform practice. International law still defines its quintet: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. This legal structure is durable, but its impact depends on how it is enacted—through community practice, municipal policy, or intergovernmental campaigns. Across regions, this work is finding traction. CARICOM’s campaign, in dialogue with the African Union, continues to press European governments toward measures tied to education, health, and technology. Municipal programmes such as Evanston, Illinois’s housing and cash-aid initiatives have already disbursed over a million dollars, even as litigation tests their scope. Cultural reparation, too, is taking new shape: the Netherlands’ large-scale returns to Indonesia and Nigeria signal a shift toward provenance-led ethics, even as the British Museum remains bound by the British Museum Act of 1963, which blocks restitution. In Nigeria, debates over the Be-
nin Bronzes’ future—between the Oba of Benin, traditional custodian in Edo State, and national museums— underscore that restitution is a beginning, not an end.
Where law and policy measure restitution in statutes and treaties, the poems gathered here imagine repair across archives, streets, languages, bodies, and ecologies. These voices come from across geographies and backgrounds, spanning Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Some write from diasporic positions, having moved between continents; others are deeply rooted in particular communities, whether in Hong Kong, South Africa, rural China, or North America. Their work is shaped not only by where they live but by what they practise: poets who are also translators, scholars, publishers, photographers, cultural organisers, and activists. Some bring the perspective of long careers with multiple books and awards; others are still students or emerging writers, composing from the vantage of youth. Together they embody a spectrum of experience, and their poems include both original works and translations from Urdu, Chinese, and French, carrying the textures of place, language, memory, and repair.
Jelo de Guzman-Altea’s “Catalogue #1898” reimagines the museum as a place of ongoing exchange, not only as a repository. Returning us to the aforementioned British Museum, the poet sets a vitrine against a living body, reading the taxonomy that shelves Philippine engravings beside poisoned arrows, and asking what kind of archive might admit a current strong enough to carry certainties away. Matt Reeck’s “Elegy Kansas Chronicle” entwines a father’s memorial with Kansas’s layered histories—Indigenous nations, settler violence, ecological strata, development, and shifting demographics. Refusing separation of grief from place, it imagines overlap rather than exclusion and suggests a reparative space where mourning, memory, and change coexist. Marc Nair’s “After Sunset on Canada Day” weighs the daily walk of freedom and fear, a street where celebration is read as threat, and where language falters in naming the lost common sense of living.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Some poems turn to shade as a provisional form of reparation. elin o’Hara slavick’s “Witness” kneels before hibakujumoku, the A-bombed persimmon tree—bearing fruit, or refusing to fruit, across decades. The tree’s endurance, rooted in “tree-time” that outlasts human life, offering both shade and testimony. Gloria Au Yeung’s “Fragments of Pocket Watches” listens to Dalí’s melting timepieces, where watches fragment and are picked up again, gestures of soft and uncertain restoration. Willow Sommer’s “History Does Not Repeat by Itself,” written in the aftermath of the US refusal of a humanitarian ceasefire vote, takes its title from a protest sign in Berlin and moves through silence, family histories, and echoes of Gaza, insisting that repair begins in the act of taking responsibility for the present tense.
Language itself becomes a workshop of repair. Tanveer Anjum’s “The Charms of Your Language,” in Carol Blaizy D’Souza’s translation, insists that words are tools shaping what can be thought and done; measured diction becomes a method of repair. Anna Yin’s translations of Yen Ai Lin extend this insight by carrying disaster and its aftermath into memory. In “You Die Yet Outlive,” the graves at Fort McKinley are imagined as “cement shrubs,” each cross marking a youth cut short, individuality both fixed and dissolved. To read them requires bowing down, making remembrance bodily. Names fade, yet through recitation the dead persist: “You vanish, and yet you’re recited.” In “Puzzle,” an unfinished jigsaw becomes the emblem of a family fractured by earthquake, father and son displaced beyond the frame of “home.” Translation here is both bridge and brace, holding fragments against erasure and affirming survival when wholeness is no longer possible. Repair also inhabits bodies and communal frameworks. JM Zorrilla’s “Antioch” tracks the pejorative turned name and the slur turned banner, searching for a liturgy capacious enough to hold queerness and Catholicism together without erasing the wound. In “Trans formational”, the poet begins with the Papacy then snaps to the bureaucrat-
ic violence of misnaming the dead, insisting on transformation as a sacred practice. Su Yun’s “The Cyclist” follows a rural collector of scraps as he rebuilds both a tricycle and a self, a wormwood-scented routine that steadies a precarious life lived outside official textbooks. Zalman S. Davis’s “when the wind forgets your name” speaks quietly of loss and its residue, the unsentimental register that many harms require. Papa Osmubal’s paired pieces, “alone 1” and “alone 2,” stage solitude differently: in one, a migrant worker’s midnight dog walk reveals her yearning for home beneath a shared moon, her tears mirrored by the animal’s gaze; in the other, a lone tree stands between protesters and armed forces in Yangon, embodying neutrality, endurance, and the estrangement of nature caught within human conflict.
Other works interrogate the narratives of recovery itself. Ellen Harrold’s “Fumigation” renders environments marked by decay, chemical residue, and staged restoration—paint sealing over rot, scenic vistas captured for the camera while the air thickens with the remnants of past generations. Repair here is cosmetic, a temporary fumigation that hides damage in order to market it, especially to tourism. In “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” Harrold turns to the mediated landscapes of virtual warzones, where glitches, pixels, and loading screens replay cycles of conflict and “peace talks haunt the news.” Restoration is corroded by the logic of the military story, where even stasis is scripted as preparation for another assault. Jin Shalei’s “Just before waking up” imagines the self pieced back together: wounds rinsed with well water, fragments reassembled by care, and a new journey beginning across the riverside. Here repair is not disguise or repetition but fragile renewal—people too can be reassembled, not identical yet alive again.
In these poems, I see repair of the archive and museum, where the logics of cataloguing are questioned and objects seen otherwise. I see repair of the polis, where ceasefires and streets and neighbourhoods are weighed for
their truth. I see repair of language, through translation, through measured speech, through the refusal to call a person by the wrong name. I see repair of ecologies and infrastructures, a tricycle running true, a tree that outlives the blast, a current that washes everything away, mud and wreckage cleared, yet never without loss, signalling both destruction and the chance of renewal. I see repair of the self and kin. When poets speak of watches, trees, streets, or stones, the figure does not block material claims. The danger is only when metaphor replaces obligation. The gain is when metaphor tutors feeling toward action, making the legal feasible because it has become speakable. Looking ahead, reparation should enter vernacular cultural expression more deeply. Not only in policy or courtrooms but in the intimate scales where memory and survival are practised: in ordinary gestures, in the recovery of languages nearly lost, in the care given to fragile objects that resist silence. In such places, community museums can loan the future back to the neighbourhood, school anthologies can teach returns and refusals, local languages can return to signage and song, editorial practices can value origins over reputations, and festivals can budget for translation and access. Culture is the scene of the repair. To those who care and ask what reparation will look like in the future, I would answer with this issue’s manifold: trees carried in the body like a memory, a bike made roadworthy from cast-offs, a word placed where the wound once was, a watch that cannot be fixed and so becomes another time. V
Elegy Kansas Chronicle by
Matt Reeck
for Jerry Reeck (Dec. 28, 1945–July 1, 2021)
1
turkey vultures fulcruming on updrafts that climb the hills rising above the fields summer corn and irrigation
Flint Hills strata over strata of chalk remainder of the ancient sea once here (skeletons ground to dust) where does the human fit into this scene?
Kansa Pawnee Osage Wichita
then “settlers” bringing new sorts of human crazy are we supposed to forgive them (so poor) (the woebegone) for what massacres they unleashed? a question mark suspended over the corpses in the history books
the setting as political as ecological
2 a kid
I hunted ringnecks lifting rocks in the cowpastures now the west end of town where retired doctors and university uppers live in tawny McMansions looking over the highway to the airport and the fort
the cow pond still hidden in the junipers that was once used for skinny dipping fishing
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
teenage pursuits
kids
don’t know the tricks of development how the promise of progress means more cars bigger roads more concrete laid over prairieland & someone somewhere getting richer (though not here)
first it was the wheatfields at the foot of our hill
Wal-Mart wanted it Farmer John was retiring and wanted his million but the neighbors banded together led by my dad went to the City Commission argued (I have the recordings to prove it)
& the “people” won a partial victory as the people’s victory can only ever be
Target moved in Panera a bank fastfood another platform parking lot with its raintime runoff of heavy chemicals and petroleum products
no reason to trust mine more than theirs each history partial & full of its own conceit ／ deceit
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
I lived in Lawrence in the poor end of town (the eastern edge) walked the brick streets the railroad tracks next to the horses would go over to Lee Chapman’s house to talk about First Intensity
(RIP Lee, dead by Covid, 2020)
I lived at the Zen Center blocks from William S. Burroughs’ old house his lover still trying to uphold his legacy a local celebrity though I forget his name these details too lost
if I don’t write them down
4
it’s hard to feel too high on yourself in Kansas too many lonely dirt roads the sky swallowing you up in town main street more like a prairie highroad
each season the weather more entertaining than the TV’s fare sun wind hail tornadoes snow lightning I still have tornado nightmares waking up with a shattered heart in Kansas still your time is spent beating back nature a house wrings the hubris out try keeping a lawn against
heat crabgrass chokeweed this summer at my dad’s carpenter bees in the recovered barnwood façade drilling 3 ／ 8th in. holes precision
crafting instruments big black bees so beautiful we killed them to sell the house though everyone has them (can’t sell a house with the obvious kept obvious) (a type of prudish settler decorum)
*
each day a chronicle worth telling big ideas die ugly deaths in Kansas they need constant caretaking stewardship dad’s ecohouse on the prairie one big idea that didn’t fail
had he read Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra”? he had Buddhas all over his house trying to keep the peace crafted into the side of the hill clad with a metal roof strawbale
walls plaster concrete stucco cherry cabinets and doors made by an old recluse carpenter in Onaga (northeast of Wamego) hard to find looking up
from Eureka Dr. next to the Job Corps where the barbed wire fences hold in the juvenile delinquents first find Saddle Rock (the hill that looks like a saddle) then the black county water tower just to the east of the firebreak on the fort’s land the prairiegrass mown flat
Zack Klentz said one fall hunting morel mushrooms on dad’s land an Apache rode silent up the hill army ambush to flash its blades and they “ran for their lives”
5
dad
dead days before our reunion our end of covid reunion
dad
dad
dad
dead too soon to say goodbye
the autopsy proves only that death is physical and inscrutable
one silly mistake proves lethal death not an idea to keep at bay
dad not born there but Kansas hopeful (a reserved hope)
all people people ／ s united by death
6 now ／ in Kansas
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
the flood of people to the Kaw River Valley outmigration (sociologists call it) people fleeing the highplains it’s not wrong to talk of ghosttowns in rural KS but Emporia reborn Hispanics come in for meatpacking jobs we eat at El Lorito across from the Tyson chicken plant (930 Google reviews 4.3 stars We look forward to serving you at El Lorito in beautiful Emporia! Thank you to all of our customers!)
now ／ in Kansas
my mom’s friend in Liberal on the Okie border a school music teacher for kids makes sure half the songs are in Spanish so everyone feels included Kansas isn’t dying it’s changing the people of Kansas are changing
7
after the shock of the news
after seeing him on the gurney all the help offered mom didn’t cook for a month things done for free a gift economy the “freely given” Glissant calls it
things done off-book things done at cost no one had been in his house in a decade 6 weeks to clean it sold in a week we took his ashes up at sunset
I chanted mantras holding Bo my three-year-old Ohm shanti ohm ohm mani padme hum ashes blew in our faces I cried an elegy for my dad
for that ecohouse on the prairie that my dad an ideas guy built against all recommendation now a cenotaph beneath the clear blue Kansan sky
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
The Charms of Your Language by
Tanveer Anjum
translated from the Urdu by Carol
Blaizy D’Souza
As many names there are for colours in your language, the world will appear as colourful to you— Memorise all the names of trees in your language— so that you may sit each time under the shade of a different name. How many types of snow do you know by name? If you were an Eskimo, you could identify twenty types of snow. Hope there aren’t too many types of human emotions in your language— lest there be nothing but emotions on your mind.
If the people around you have become few, then give each person many, many names— And search with me the many names for love— so that we may make, each time, love of a new name.
The Cyclist by Su Yun
What treasures he might unearth amidst the weeds’ retreat. His hands fumble through the shadows while I observe with clasped hands. Winds carry whispers from turbulent days, drawing me closer to witness his discoveries displayed upon his mud-spattered tricycle: faded firecracker remnants and weathered chains. Perhaps better to gather weeds and kindle flame— perhaps better to collect stones and build refuge. Soon he rises, proudly holding his newfound weapon, rusty in appearance, yet sharp enough to sever bonds— to cut free from the entangling ropes of existence. He turns, revealing another prize: a broken phonograph, still breathing melodies into the air. I hope its song continues eternally. When one voice rises, forests echo in harmony. When one heart finds joy, birds join in celebration. Discarded firecracker papers and chains release bitterness, silencing the chorus of critical voices. The open path before us reveals this truth: a heart already aflame needs no spark, a free-spirited tricycle needs no shelter.
Seeds in Salt Ground
by Rachel A. Yeung
i. Wound
Dear girl who learned to live outside her skin— They planted winter in your summer bones, taught you that your body was a house you could no longer call home. You became vapor, mist and memory, learning to breathe in the spaces between heartbeats.
ii. Repair
Now I come back for what was stolen: the right to say yes, the right to say no, the knowledge that your body belongs to you alone. I cut the albatross from around your neck, watch it sink into deep water. I wash their hands from your memory, return your skin to innocence, teach you that healing is not forgetting— it's remembering you were never broken, only bent.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
iii. Rebirth
What they meant to destroy became my foundation. I built myself stronger at every fracture line. My body is no longer a battlefield— it's a temple I tend with reverence. I am the girl who survived and the woman who thrives, graceful as a swan breaking surface tension, proof that some things are too wild to be conquered. I keep what serves me. I burn the rest.
by Jelo de Guzman-Altea
1
2
Enter right-handed. As you have been taught. This room will accommodate.
Name the entireties: partial spectres—column without roof, stairs leading to—where ruins have been swept, routes from us to us waterwashed by the tattered continent.
3
4
5
6
This is the anatomy of memory (Repeat, slant).
This is the anatomy of memory (Think of another permutation).
Name the minutiae: a biography the breadth of a whisper beneath whose tongue a dogeared decade dogpiled, a confiscated god who for want of an ornate altar “betrays” [the white note goes] “its godliness.”
How caught between the two-and-five we are meso- as the flatlands gathering rain, basins aware of their own approximal death.
We are un-distance belying that, from first point to elsewise, we are unrelenting unrealities we cannot name truthful as an|archive is not.
History does not repeat by itself by Willow Sommer
My grandfather naps each afternoon he’s holding the news reviewing the world from safe in his sunroom
You might call his statements elderly, confused; today all he could articulate when mentioning the news:
Have you seen the photos? of Gaza, he said, it looks just like Ulm.
encased in glass where light bursts shimmering through but doesn’t break; he’s defied his own fate
In Ulm 1945, I was six years of age, he tells me again, as his eyes turn away:
sifting through rubble as children we played hunting cigarette butts to trade with Ami soldiers who’d come to save our city; their ruins— and only the church tower remained like an offering to the sky
don’t flatten me with your planes.
Sparse tourists and their selfies roaming on crushed snow fallen over nameless soldiers and their frozen bones below.
We were so sure we’d learned, we’d even carved it into stone.
Deep under the ground, at least they certainly know the ones whose bones aren’t buried alone.
Unnamed soldier, up on your throne accompanied only by a forgotten red rose,
And somewhere as blood spreads blooming, that rose stains the snow,
red rage for the first time pricks under my skin, like a thorn, raw and bold: I will learn from my kin.
Open their veins shout from our throats Invisible; screaming We’re all just ghosts.
The pain comes through the letters curve Calligraphic around their words The beat, the drum; The spoons and sticks The power comes from the Arabic Vibrating warm, lips pull filter smoke Green eyes sharp and damp fluffy coats
Rolling r and rasping g Gaza, gaza will be free
They chant, we repeat The relentless refrain: Just another wall, bombs yet again—
If we listen, we’d learn, That curse of history:
As blood still flows from river to sea,
No one, no one will be free.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
repair by
Akin Jeje
It is not enough to simply, publicly announce that the lands you occupy were once ours. The skies have also watched previous justifications and denials.
It is not enough to sing ancestral names of lands and peoples colonised. The winds have long known our heaves and sighs.
Destiny, however manifest, is another disingenuous lie: rape, removal, replacement under a fleecy disguise.
There is no Great Replacement, unless you feel the need to be great again as in an in-glorious past where might rendered stones and creeks and rushes bright crimson, morning spills from warm bodies still smoking peacefully from fusillades.
You cannot replace their bodies, fallen on plains and savannahs, flung into oceans or laid prone on cane fields, factory floors or thorny desert sands.
You cannot replace souls held in bondage, their stories blended in flits of pain and laughter amidst the mournful cacophony.
Even showers of your fabricated paper, your current currency, cannot obliterate our present state. We require repair, repeat repair for reparation. We require wholeness, not devastation.
We must return to nations. We are aware there was no edenic past before you. We are human too.
There is no part, as in parting, aparting, apartness, apartheid in reparation. Hear dialogue, hear reconciliation, hear repair, hear renouncement of violence, hear decolonisation.
Hear us. Listen to what we mean by reparation.
After Sunset on Canada Day by
Marc Nair
and what if the fireworks that reverberate railway tracks, adorn long streets warm with boomboxes and dancing bodies, were really junctions of small arms fire, tracers blooming against a consternation of sirens
and instead of street lights, there are mourning sites for the dead, instead of party buses, shells of exploded aid trucks, instead of pretty names: palm, peony, chrysanthemums, prayers keen like hungry ghosts
on a night wind that blows through both these cities, both these ideas: one where freedom is celebrated, the other where death is orchestrated, cities overlaid in the darkroom of the same roll of film, shot over and over again
and what if tonight is really about failure— the poem as a failure to capture loss, the city as a failure to hold us safe, to call others to account, to see these lights in the sky and think of home, and hellscape
Witness by elin o'Hara slavick
A-Bombed persimmon trees stand in a vulnerable row of five. There once were twenty but the heat and blast of Fat Man— a bulging bomb of plutonium— incinerated them into nothingness. These five are the exceptional survivors. Only one no longer bears fruit— its trunk split and pockmarked with dark fragile ravines of criminal history. The trees owner has planted daisies around the fruitless tree.
One tree houses an iron support inside its trunk, the wound filled in with a pale pink hardness. The trunk grows over this fleshy filled crevice 1mm a year. For now, the pink scar runs up the tree, a suspended infection.
Looking up into the immeasurable heat and light of the August Nagasaki sky, you can see the hard round green fruits of the Japanese persimmon— clusters of generations carrying on, waiting for everlasting peace.
The trees are not marked, untended by the city. They stand mercifully on the side of a narrow neighborhood street. I trace the bark with my guilty American hand, powerless to heal the rupture, to unburn the still black charred surface 80 years later.
With each click of the shutter my camera apologizes and recognizes the trees as witnesses.
Two hibakusha (A-Bomb survivors) stand with me— as witnesses. They introduce me to the trees and to the woman who owns and takes care of them.
We sweat. We look. We remember. We look up. We walk back and forth. We move in close and then pull back— pushing ourselves up against the neighbor’s gate to breathe in this living reliquary.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Fumigation
by Ellen Harrold
Light-struck and bruised from the oxides. Flaying the make-up to some more primordial state, ooze landscape, along the amicable—soaking through the cultural references to stain the first impression. A lick of paint— salivates the remains, spittle dripping to the newspaper clumped with the mottled carapaces. Molecular remnants together, still twitching on the atomic scale. In corners and meeting points, they clot and secede the space.
Still behind, the air hovers—silent and laden. Decay matters, evaporating to the path of least resistance. Paint cracks—oxygen flurry—the expanding space between our lungs, open and waiting, the window is shut. Keeping out more: air and spiders in abundance. Hideous against white, they oxidise and clash, rending the perfection in two, then three. Blooming the floor with subtle distortions and the remnants of previous generations. It only has to last a few weeks, until the view has been captured on camera. Good thing you can’t smell a scenic vista.
Ludonarrative Dissonance by
Ellen Harrold
—After Suzanne Treister’s Would You Recognise A Virtual Paradise?
Flighty chromatics coalesce into a semi-solid shape— irreconcilable with verbs in the background.
It spins every time I blink. New face rotation, you only see it for the colours. The rest is all noise, flickering stills. A repulsive iris blooms in the electrostatic buildup. Bullets spin to the aether, until they stop, then maybe they’ll appear again; when the pixels bleed, and the walls come crumbling down.
The numbers all bleed out, ideas and storyboards translated— three dimensions of binary. Still, the options splinter
and the stories come into their own. Ink runs on paper while glitches dance across the screen. Peace talks haunt the news.
All comes alive again, conventions reset at the touch of a button.
Loading screens drone on as the next screen is set.
Call of Duty, TIP: Use your weapon butt when behind an enemy for a one-hit lethal attack.
Super Glue
by Joshua Wan
The pharmacy just stocked up And a new treatment appeared, “Super Glue, now for hearts— Guaranteed good feelings and dried-up tears.”
One can only imagine the rush To wrap their fingers around this product, Because all the cash is worth it If it meant closing up their tear ducts.
I see a man, double my age, Stricken by a bitter divorce. He would empty out his paycheque If it meant healing his heart by force.
I see a young woman, naïve at heart But who’s seen enough to shatter the spirit of men. Could this glue fix her broken body And spirit worn down and trapped from within?
What about the high school student With infinite dreams, but little choice? Maybe the glue can assemble his future, And he can treat expectations as noise.
The line stretches out the store, And people queue around the block, All with hearts broken and needing repair, And their patience racing against the clock.
I see the man grab his bottle, And he smears his heart with the concoction. The girl drinks it like bottled water, And the student applies it like lotion.
They sit on benches, waiting for results. Quiet hours passed, and nothing happened. Even after waiting, their hearts still ached, And soon piles of glue filled up the trash can.
It’s been three years, and how things changed— The divorced man found someone new, it seems. The girl confronting the hurt she felt in the past, And the student’s rebellion to follow his dreams.
Maybe the glue took three years to activate, And the whole time it was just curing. Enough time has passed for the customers to forget About the pain they thought was ever-enduring.
Was it time, or was it the glue That healed their broken hearts? Perhaps it was just their unbroken will That did the difficult part.
Whatever the fact is, no matter the truth, Or however the healing happened that each asserts— With just the right angles, it becomes clear: The super glue for hearts definitely works.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Just before waking up by Jin
Shalei
I’ll collect my limbs pick piece by piece my tough fragility put myself back together reframe my room window wash the curtains
Then I can step forward into a new beginning and slide out slowly from the deaf end
I’ll rebuild my shadows trim them with sun I’ll clean my open wounds by water from the little well in the bamboo garden in my front yard those dry leaves floating on the well’s water surface will absorb all the pain
I’ll secretly leave it there in silence climb the fence facing the riverside get in the boat by that huge linden tree and row on in another direction
You Die Yet Outlive by Yen Ai Lin translated from the Chinese by Anna Yin
Fort McKinley World War II Military Cemetery.
On the green lawn, death irrigates fields of white crosses. These pristine cement shrubs bear rings that halt at 16, 17, 19, 21, 23... We must bend down to meet their plain leaves, fading— fading—a name fades, so much that only with a bowing stance can we read the letters engraved:
Albert, the protector, Baron, the nobleman, Chad, the soldier, Darren, the potential, Edison, the caretaker, Frank, the free, Gordon, the steadfast, Hardy, the brave, Ivan, the fierce, Jason, the healer, Kennedy, the leader, Leonard, the lion, Mark, the aggressive, Nat, the gifted, Oliver, the dearest, Patrick, the well-born, Quentin, the wealthy, Raymond, the guardian, Spark, the energetic, Tony, the revered, Ulysses the monarch, Victor, the conqueror, William, the warrior, Xavier, the radiant, York, the farmer, Zebulon the homebound…
Who are you? You are not just these names. Born in California, Florida, Connecticut, Iowa, Hawaii… but here you have become a collective you. In the end, the Philippines gathers you all into its soil. You become trees, you become air. You vanish, and yet you're recited. You die, and monuments are born. On the gentle hills, rows of white cross shrubs— it is not leaves that wither but your names.
Puzzle by Yen Ai Lin translated
from the Chinese by
Anna Yin
In memory of the victims of the September 21 Earthquake
That night, in the living room, I was piecing together a puzzle. The hours stretched on and on—the board still incomplete. I thought—when Mid-Autumn Festival comes, my sister would return, and together, we’d finish it.
Who’s rocking me?
I've already grown, and fast asleep— Who is rocking me into an even deeper slumber?
I slept for so long— the sky never brightened.
Yet I heard my sister calling from outside the door, "Little brother, where are you?"
Then I dreamed—
Dad and I, two puzzle pieces, lay outside a twisted, deformed frame. No one came to place us back into the missing space of “home.”
when the wind forgets your name by Zalman S. Davis
i asked the sky what it means to endure— it opened its mouth & a bird fell through.
a woman said, a quiet man is closer to god because he doesn't interrupt what's already leaving. every morning i walk the line between what i want & what wants me back.
life isn't the flame but the bruise left by light.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Antioch
by
JM Zorrilla
i. New Testament
They had called the people of Antioch Crazy, little, uncritical, unbecoming, sheep Of the false lord. All these had become Preaching word to kill, to be thrown as a stone, As a slur, they called them Christians,[1]
Followers of the Way of Christ
They stood as rocks slurred their faces, Believed in the salvation of their belief, And survived to live as they became Christians, Living proofs of Christ’s faith In their community of love.
ii. Now Testament
They had called me and my people Crazy, little, uncritical, unbecoming, sheep Of the false lord. All these had become Preaching word to kill, to be thrown as a stone, As a slur, they called us Queers,[2] Followers of the Way of Cocks ‘n Clits
We stood as rocks slurred our faces, Believed in the salvation of our belief, And survived to live as we became Queers, Living proofs of Christ’s faith In our community of love.
And so, in slurs and stones, we rejoiced Our names—Queer, Christian, unbroken, the same.
[1] Acts 11:26
[2] Acts of the Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’ Apostles’
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Trans formational by
JM Zorrilla
After the Conclave, After the Autopsy, After the Revision
From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI
From Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Pope Francis
From Robert Francis Prevost to Pope Leo XIV
From █████████ to Ms. Angie Mead King
From ██████████ to Mr. Jake Zyrus
From ██████ to Ms. Geraldine Roman
It is normal to transform a name. To transform a name is to affirm the new life. A transfiguration.
From ██████ to Ms. Mary Jo Añonuevo to “Deceased 55-year-old male”
From ███████ to Mr. Ebeng Mayor to “Deceased 21-year-old female”
From ████████ to Ms. Jessa Remiendo to “Deceased 29-year-old male”
It is normal to transform a name. To transform a name is to affirm the new life. A transfiguration. But it is abnormal to transform their new life into a dead name.
From God to Jesus to Jesus Christ to Savior of the World (∞)
From Saul the Killer to Paul the Apostle to “Deceased 65-year-old male” to Saint Paul – The Pauline Epistles (AD 48–AD 67)
From ████████ to Ms. Jennifer Laude to “Deceased 26-year-old male” to #JunkVFA – Call Her Ganda (2018)
From ███████ to Ms. Heart Chavez to “Deceased 26-year-old male” to #StopTheKillings – Some People Need Killing (2023)
From ████████ to Ms. Dee Supelanas to “Deceased 26-year-old male” to #LongLiveKabankalan7 – [ ] ( )
It is normal to transform a name. To transform a name is to affirm the new life. A transfiguration. But it is abnormal to transform their new life into a dead name. So, the only way forward is for us to trans. From birth, names, bodies, laws, religions, existence, up until death, we must trans. Transgress. Transfigure. Transcend. We trans mourning into memory, memory into media, media into moments, and moments into a movement. A movement of breaths that breathe resurrection and fights that fight for living, which ultimately trans forms lives
From trans to trans to trans to you.
Teks: An Attempt to Remember
by Leandro Reyes
The summer of 2002 was very much forgettable. I was no older than the tree in front of my dead grandmother’s house with roots that’ll, one day, force cracks on concrete. We spent afternoons and weekends, holding small cardboard pieces of repeatable, mass-printed art. The biggest talk we could afford was: whose crush was whose. We did not care for funerals, we did not attend to who caught whose husband cheating with whom. Could you imagine the skill of fake news production before the internet? We did not care for that–Yet. We were cartoon watchers, computer shop dwellers, we would easily forget the origins of the collected skin scars. It was one of seventy two other falls. (e.g. when I kissed gravel and skinned my name into asphalt: An unreliable memory.)
Today, when do you start worrying about the scar?
1. As the wound opens 2. Before running 3. When you were asked to run 4. Tuesday
In 2002, stairs were where people sit, and pass and fall. They were not knee problems and back pain. We were injury-destined sidewalk gap jumpers, marble traders, earthworm cutters, dry leaf crunchers. We did not worry about breath and demise. We were worried about the survival ／ revival of Son Goku. Death was all around us on a daily basis but oldness was just another fruit on just another table. Some of us are not born to have ／ be grandparents. Rain was an opportunity to go out and hope it gets just a little more stronger–just a little longer and sickness was worth risking.
2003 we survived firecrackers to live the next year–exactly the same.
Note: Teks (or text cards) were small, mass-printed collectible cardboard cards popular among Filipino children from the 1970s to early 2000s. Often featuring cartoon characters, anime scenes, or action heroes, these cards were traded, played with, and stored in shoeboxes or plastic containers. The game involved flicking or flipping teks in battles of chance (no skill). More than just a pastime, teks were a form of community bonding and everyday childhood.
Run by Leandro Reyes
and what if This is the order of the river, read as blood, bloodshed, bloodbound. as children we are taught that as a child we are first a renewal of blood. We are earmarks of the bells that ring, alarm the arrival of guests, the tower clangs the same round of rises and rests, when the wedding starts the same clangs of curses and spells when as the dead depart. Yesteryear, the ice cream Vendor died and yesterday his son, made the village rounds, swinging the same bell the clings and dings and dings and dings: still meant mango, melon, macapuno. Milk and roots and family fruits don’t perish after they die. They wilt when the forgetting persists.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Fragments of Pocket Watches
by Gloria Au Yeung
Our memories of those pocket watches, finding their way— the symbol of space unfolding our last trace.
We restore the wacky tree, building our woody winter. We pick up the melting days and the frozen ways.
The rocks have gathered their shapes, connecting to our fragments of moments. We revamp the drunken shadows silently and softly.
The table reinstalls its floating light. Someone finds a glittering stone, carrying the shining shadows.
Some pocket watches begin to fly— built-in winders embark on their journey, walking across the wasteland, like tin soldiers jumping into our opening.
Note: This poem is inspired by Salvador Dalí’s surrealist painting “The Persistence of Memory”.
Longing by Zixia
Liu
This was before the age of cars. Mom used to carry me on her bike, in a rear seat made of metal wires. She carried me through tree-lined streets as I
recited the words carved into stone—the one that stood in front of the literature museum. At every turn in the road, I waited for Mom’s signal. Then together we swung
our bodies in unison as the bike made its turn.
Mom always knew where we were going. Back then, the world was smaller than it is now. How to reckon with the past
when the present feels more like a foreign land?
To know the weight of remembrance, tree by tree, snowflake by snowflake. They
dissolve into smoke and mist. In the forest, plastic bags grow, aching quietly. Not far from a gutter, the wind gathers tiny pieces of plastic foam into
a small snowstorm. I remember nothing of the stone of my childhood. As we rushed into the age of cars, then the age of electric scooters and delivery services,
the world spun faster until it lost focus. Are our bloodstreams so filled with plastic that our hearts forget how to be kind? So this aching—for a past where seconds and minutes still mattered, where hard work paid off, and people, knowing better, cared. This quiet ache for the tree-lined streets before the age of cars.
summer stands by Sara Maria Hasbún
we spend all our time on rooftops, and our feet don’t touch the ground.
we're eye-level with the pigeons, they're strung up with whistles, but we Beijing humans have even less that is asked of us, right now, just to hand over the wine-opener, to close the lid on the cooler, to be kind to each other, and sometimes we can manage two of the three.
my favorite barista is drunk, and asks if I believe in reincarnation, but before I can answer, he says that he reincarnates every day, that its freeing, but also sad.
because he can take nothing with him, from each day to the next, not even this hutong rooftop, not even the tinkle of ice in a bucket, a catkin resting sweetly on an eyelash.
At night I dream an arrogant dream, that I am only the most recent in a line of drunken poets traversing China, wearing men's robes which do not flatter, and drinking wine that is too sweet, but a farmer cuts the brush away to show me a view he hasn't seen himself since childhood, a river sleeping softly against a bed of hackberry forest, and we drink together and look at the river, and he writes a much better poem than mine, so I give the farmer my pen and I take his scythe, but I'm useless among the wheat.
the next day I wake up and I'm no longer a badly-dressed poet, I'm only badly-dressed. my scythe is gone, and I think, is this what the barista meant by reincarnation? I go to Wangjing to see a friend, and I tell him I cross half of Beijing to drink with you, I cross
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
a hail of catkins to drink with you, to drink and be drunk.
There is a sore in my mouth that I tongue every day, It is the sore that asks: is this real life? is this real? is this life? and if not, when does that start? If you have to ask, says the drunk barista, then don't worry, because tomorrow you'll wake up, and ask the question again.
The Ring
by Sara Maria Hasbún
In Plato's "Ring of Gyges", a shepherd named Gyges discovers a ring that grants him invisibility, allowing him to act without fear of consequences.
If there is such a thing as truth, I think it only comes out at night, like at Queenie's Sandwiches, where it macerates in the smoke and disco lights, sometime before the Kazakh gangsters grab their shopping bags and just before Beijing’s milky dawn threatens us through shrouded windows, and just before the pop hits yield to sad Uyghur ballads, the DJ’s way of telling us to get the fuck out.
because truth is a flower that blooms only briefly and under the harshest conditions,
bumped around by glittered bodies and watered by Worker’s Pale Ale and what is it about the unblinking red eye that subverts our caution? the eye sees all, all see the eye, the eye sees none, we forget the eye, the truth sleeps nestled among terabytes of data, and until you play the tape, the pixels both lie and do not lie. somewhere in there is a jacket both taken and left behind a beer bottle dropped and not dropped, a kiss, and no kiss.
What a blessing that in the hungover memories we plumb over jianbing breakfast, and over weeks to come we find only the rough outlines of recognizable local fauna: joy, sex, and friendship. the only beasts here that are more reliable, and more welcome, than truth.
But there in the darkness of the dance floor, would the shepherd kill the king? would the shepherd kiss the queen?
twist the ring, twist the ring
Flesh Mechanics by
Jennifer Anne Eagleton
“Reparation”—Late Middle English: from Old French, from late Latin reparatio (n-), from reparare “make ready again” (See repair)
“A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” (Opening narration of The Six Million Dollar Man, a popular 1970’s TV show)
Reality caught up to TV scriptwriters, and now we can say, the bio has been truly hacked by the machine.
Since the frail human condition can now be altered Why not let technology create a superior being?
Once only the realm of scientists and physicians, now the liberating potential of do-it-yourself. (Body enhancements on YouTube!)
Flesh becomes merely a plug for electronic circuitry, existence, becoming, and reality have no meaning. Ontological boundaries blur the definition of life And the existing artificial dichotomies between human and the machine will disappear.
Ultimately it will not matter as long as we are Citius—Altius—Fortius.*
However, technical extension, beyond simple repair is really an amputation of our necessary frailty. “Perfection” is “imperfection”.
* Latin for “Faster-Higher-Stronger”
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
Beached by Jennifer Anne Eagleton
Bonds so strong, a healthy whale, if pushed back into the ocean—“refloated”, will re-beach themselves, on hearing the call from a stranded pod member on the shore.
If humans hear a relative has made it to a promised land, Their pod members will band together on a perilous journey. Setting off to sea in rickety, unseaworthy boats.
Other humans see them enter abundant waters. See trouble if they manage to reach the beach. Not enough resources for new arrivals, they say. So, they are pushed out to sea again, In their rickety, unseaworthy boats.
Some drown, others are washed up on beaches. Human pods, their own mass stranding. They can’t be “refloated” to the land of the living.
Lying face down on a Turkish beach, is a little boy, red shirt, dark shorts, it is like he’s sleeping, but he’s not. The tide washes over him, like a blanket.
His photo becomes an iconic image. There’s outrage. Something must be done! Then people forget.
People prefer to save whales.
CODA
Our forgetfulness means that we do not know if one day we may also need to embark on a perilous journey and set off to sea in rickety, unseaworthy boats. Then who will remember us.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
The Last of the Letter Carriers
by F. Jordan Carnice
“A fire broke out in the basement of a five-story building just before midnight, continuing for seven hours before being officially declared under control on the morning of May 22. According to firefighters, two nearby mailmen attempted to contain the fire early on, using buckets of water before emergency responders arrived.”
—Massive fire destroys nearly 100-year-old post office overnight, The Calcettan Chronicle (23 May 2023)
The messages end with fire. Rooms are emptied of stories, along the hallways endearments coded in ash. No one will ever know your secret now—except the punctured packages, gifts forever in transit, forever singed. Outside, stairs rise to columns like blackened teeth, a sick sneer stamped right at the city centre. One of those postcards should’ve been mine, and it has travelled so slowly—as one would wish for a night unbound by longing. What good is a future without its promise? What is passion against a consuming force?
The last of the carriers look to the carboned skies for answers, their faces tired like letters stashed for too long in cabinets. The smoke envelops everything, and those in witness to great tragedies— everything envelops love. This loss is a language no page can contain.
Darning a sock by
Vinci Yung
You learned every sewing technique in school except this. You knew how to cross-stitch and create French knots and crochet, but it was your grandmother who taught you to make things whole again. First, slip the frayed sock over an egg to add tension in the fabric. Next, choose carefully your needle and thread. She told you her days in the garment factory, how the hours were counted by stitches, and how radio dramas spun their yarn every day. You thought of Zhinü alone among the clouds. I dreamt of leaving, she said, I just didn't know how. Continue, she said, pressing the needle into the cotton. The thread exits and enters until the hole is encircled. Then it reaches across, so dense it becomes a screen, enveloping the past— years spent binding seams, preparing meals, untying her husband's temper after the horse races, each memory crossing into another, each scrap weaving a life. She never graduated from primary school, but she could fix everybody’s uniforms. Nothing was beyond repair. She used to say you can't take knowledge into the coffin. Interlacing the threads, you felt the fabric strengthening. Little squares replace what has been lost, hoping it won't unravel again.
Buried Tongue
by Avril Shakira Villar
Grandfather buried his tongue beneath the floorboards when soldiers arrived speaking conquest in uniforms, demanding silence from throats that once sang prayers in languages older than borders— so when I discovered his journals, written in script I couldn't decipher, hidden behind loose bricks where mice nested, his words became ghosts haunting my mouth, syllables I'd never learned dissolving like sugar in rain.
I was sixteen when I found them, brittle leaves stained brown with age, characters bleeding into memory of what vanished— tales of peaks where our bloodline slept, formulas for broths that cured fevers, lists of relatives cast across seas by conflicts that carved new nations. Unable to translate the grief, I carried those volumes to my professor, an exile who wept recognizing the dialect, who taught me each forgotten phrase was a small resurrection.
But translation couldn't resurrect the ceremonies, the midnight feasts where elders passed wisdom through bread broken by weathered palms— I started seeing absence everywhere, empty spaces at holiday tables, traditions severed like telephone wires, children who would never hear lullabies hummed in mother tongues, recipes that died with grandmothers who spoke only broken English to daughters ashamed of accents.
Years passed before I understood healing meant more than learning pronunciation guides, more than hanging ancestral photographs on walls painted white by assimilation. When my daughter emerged, screaming against clinic glare, I pressed those salvaged phrases to her scalp, marking her with sounds that had survived smuggling in my grandfather's careful script, swearing she would know the weight of words that nearly died.
These mornings I show her how to curl her tongue around consonants he hoarded in notebooks, her baby teeth catching syllables like fish hooks, her throat becoming the vessel where everything we almost lost learns to swim again— each mispronounced attempt a small victory over erasure, proof that what they tried to bury keeps clawing upward.
Voice & Verse Special Feature: “Reparation”
alone 1 by
Papa Osmubal
Dead of night and the crickets sing their saddest songs
This Filipina domestic helper quietly walks her employer’s Beagle
She absent-mindedly pauses and gropes for her smartphone
She takes a few quick photos and videos of the full silver moon
She is going to send them to her loved ones
Her eyes show her deep longing for her moon back home
The dog empathically stares at the tears rolling down her face
alone 2 by Papa
Osmubal
‘Anti-coup protesters flash the three-finger salute, a symbol of resistance, as they are confronted by security forces in Thaketa township, Yangon, Myanmar, March 27, 2021.’— Voice of America (VOA)
the outfitted military on one side the great unwashed on the other on one side are burning eyes on the other faces asking why
in between opposite barricades in town dirt road stands a lone tree so privileged and so very proud of having mere leaves and roots of having no nationality and race of not belonging to any side
The Heron Rookery of My Grandfather’s Ghost by Patrick Beurard-Valdoye translated from the French by Matt Reeck
the heron rookery was already there from the first time the wading bird registered in my mind the live wire to the story of a grandfather escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp
I had already met this fisherman who used mercurochrome to revive a pike wounded by a yellow beak its scar was still visible seven years later
he told other truthtale fables assuring me that out of all animals fish grow the most after death
on his porch a carved wooden jewel box just like the one in my attic he declared that his father had been a prisoner in Germany held in a camp next to the Neckar River
exactly where my grandfather was held the one I had never known anything about
the fisherman knew endless details possessed 31 ways of looking at the overpopulated ex-factory and a wooden box with his fiancée’s initials carved in florid cursive like that mysterious object I had taken from my family’s bric-a-brac
his father had cut the hair of my grandfather a secret for my ears alone this story that he believed in the longer he spoke
they had eaten cod for three months cod for breakfast cod soup for dinner cod with rutabagas for lunch
on the verges of the Jaulnay Forest a hop skip and a jump from the Meuse I observed that evening under the sumptuous sycamores stained white from the heron colony’s guano the birds flying in circles above the nests in a perpetual FRAUK-JAUK-AK-AK
then I had all the crucial details to confirm the evasion of my ghost the bird called a heron
seven years would be necessary to pay my debt to the ardea cinerea and to traverse this exile as a peddler of languages
on the ruins of the prisoner factory a birthing hospital was built one day an ashen heron flew overhead playing the role of the stork perhaps
this was how a superstitious friend learned she was born on this hellish hectare where a thousand French grunts masturbated soundlessly till the end of the night
勝景工業大廈 4 字樓 A 室 45 KUT SHING ST., CHAI WAN, HONG KONG ann@artwayprinting.com ann@artwayprinting.com
電話 2552 7410
TEL: 2552 7410
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香港中文大學出版社 THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF 香港新界沙田 HONG KONG PRESS, LADY HO TUNG HALL 香港中文大學 THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG 何東夫人堂 SHATIN, NEW TERRITORIES, HONG KONG S.A.R. cup-bus@cuhk.edu.hk cup-bus@cuhk.edu.hk
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澳門、台北、吉隆坡、新加坡定點銷售 邊度有書｜澳門連勝街 47 號地下 季風帶書店｜台灣台北市大同區迪化街一段 198 號 2 樓 草根書室 Grassroots Book Room ｜ 25 Bukit Pasoh Road, Singapore 089839
• We seek unpublished poems, translations of poems, and critical articles about poetry. The magazine is copyrighted, with rights reverting to the author on publication. We are open to all styles in contemporary poetry.
• Submissions should be sent to swpoetry@gmail.com as a WORD document with all texts typed, single-spaced (double spaces will be interpreted as blank lines). Your name, email address, and mailing address should be included on the first page of the attachment.
• We are unable to reply personally to unsuccessful submissions. In the case of no reply within 60 days of submission, please consider the submission unsuccessful. We regret that we are unable to engage in correspondence or give feedback.
• The local author will be paid at a modest rate for poems upon publication and will also receive one free copy of the issue in which her or his work appears. Our rate for translations and critical articles vary, depending on the length. Please consult swpoetry@gmail.com.
• You may subsequently republish piece(s) first appeared in our magazine. We would, however, appreciate a published acknowledgment.
香港藝術發展局全力支持藝術表達自由，本計劃內容並不反映本局意見。
Musical Stone Publishing Limited is financially supported by the HKADC. 石磬文化有限公司為香港藝術發展局資助團體。
