千里江山图
Note: The image used in this poem (above) is a fragment of the painting 千里江山图 (A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains) by Song landscape painter Wang Ximeng. He created this piece upon an imperial commission and died shortly after its completion; it is widely said that he walked into his own painting.
Hu Tianbao, God of Rabbits
The train leaves without a word. Tonight,
each tender valley clenches into your chest.
I have been on my knees so long
I see blue. You talk about mornings
when you rise hollow as a grandfather
and trudge through snow, shaking.
Sometimes, I think there is nothing besides birdflight and regret.
Nothing. I follow you from pavilion to pavilion.
Should a child talk? I open the door
and water rushed the room, washed away
all my good sons.
Confucius says once the heart unmoors,
it travels backwards to the moment of its birth.
You wash ashore toothless and blue.
All night our prayers fall. A mute lover
could walk through marshland for a century.
I wake early to let rabbits in the front door, my ancestors still waiting in the mud.
I wait for nothing.
I watch you fly from tree to tree
for years.
I hear the old silence of your body, your heart unmooring like an empire.
Singapore is Dusk, Sweat, Little Cities
the city is graceless in its angles, jutting between the soft clay valleys
and the hipbones, creaking along my fingertips,
their subtle touch. and let the familiar heat
slather its tongue over us, angelic and unrelenting. let the dank new dark
sail me, brandish me. I am the light from the end of
his cigarette, in the cab, forever turning
and transitory. how many egrets lost footing in the candles of your chest,
syllables broken by rust? how could you forget our bodies’ marshes,
yellow in the sweet of Shanghai, all the words smooth-moving,
how silence ripened, unmoored like ships across trembling shorelines,
and what, was I doomed to be fleeting?
and all of Serangoon with me?
we were flame. our bodies bruised, aching,
smeared with stars. if I could have
only one thing.
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Bella Zhou 周唯 is a high school student living on Vancouver Island. She is also a filmmaker and bassist, and she advocates for harm reduction in the opioid crisis. Her poems can be found in GASHER, Jet Fuel Review, and Shō Poetry Journal.
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