The Failed Work
On translation, Barthes wrote, make them
contemporary. Elsewhere, he made language
a skin bare to the tip of a thumb. A kind of
happenstance: instant, livid, bereft of further
asking. It says, hold on to the spine & crease
the creases. It says, repeat the shifting lives.
Repeat & move in a wound roomier
than the flesh. I think of all those obscene
movies I watched in my early twenties,
how every woman I come to be infatuated
with has cries as smoky as a bird. I think of
how plain the English porn is. 毛片,
the archaic Chinese slang for pornography,
meaning also unedited films: two soundless
bodies riding past each other, wearing out
their desire as frayed fabric. Some words
must be left open for the ghosts to move in.
Here’s my father on the windless afternoon
listening discreetly to the coarse writhing
of a magpie. Later, he will return to the living
room & rub these lines against his wet finger.
He will dream a dream & the work
he is gently grazing is
more ancient than me.
Love Letter
In the previous life, you and I were the last line
of an old Chinese myth: A ransacked empire.
A black jade swallowed by the young lapidary
as he ran through fire and out
of the red walls. A forest came across
and he fell in love with a nine-tailed fox
who turned out to be a cursed nymph.
I will not bother you with further turbulences,
all the seas are torched, corundum now.
Every morning, I wake up to fetch water
from the temple. Mountains slowly boat
out of the ink. Below, the thickets sloping.
I see a little blue bird asking who
made this land so Proustian and dry.
When I come back, you are still sleeping,
half of your thigh exposed to the light,
almost mottled. Hours, I sit at your side
and read a poem about a woman making
a nest, who let cattails cut her hands
to test their fidelity, the number of worlds
they could inlay. Tonight, I will run my fingers
through your hair a few more times. How else
could I explain my years in ecstasy and exile?
Shiyang Su is a Chinese poet and an undergrad at UChicago. Her other poems can be found or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, Rattle, Passages North, Gigantic Sequins, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was nominated for Best New Poets.