Category: Issue 26

With permission from the publisher WILDCARD A light-hearted lullaby this, not much happens that doesn’t already happen somewhere else:  a garnet-red baby opens wide its tiny jungle mouth. Familiar to all who read them, lullabies are  about kisses, jealousies and parents / keepers. Raging in the pillow, rising like a statue made of ash.  A parent is a house.…

This mouth grows in it a forestborn from the spitof the godsof my land;chews a wildfirethat blackens the stumps of my teeth;hums the serenadeof our greatest hunters. This mouth can utter to lifethe many names of our ancestorsthe conquerors could neverwrap their tongues around,the ones they spat with regretas their teeth disintegrated,choking on the sharpinflections of the…

  My days come and go, their almost motionless river is swept with traces, am I in the river’s current or on the edge? I see the shores of Lethe. The river repeats itself unchangingly, on and on, endlessly until we heave ourselves, the river and me, out.                   The garden is This Garden. This garden is…

CEMETERY OF THE DROWNED To my shipwrecked brothers on the island of Inhaca As your hymn hangs above the mouth of the castaway I call out your name, I call you with this tongue whose words are more than just a soft murmur, a sob, a liquid wound, a widow’s voice, an estranged orphanhood beyond…

THROUGH THE LAKE, THROUGH THE WATER The beeches stand there, imposing, untouched,steeped in time: I wanderthrough the tall yellow hall of leavesand listen to the openchords: October, whoever cries herecries inwards,the wood bridge has sucked the salve dry.The underworldly bamboo flutes resound through the lake, through the water, the wind islead poured into stone molds.…

NON-IDENTIFIED FEMININE OBJECTS  Cinematic princesses escaping from an Eastward facing convent have long known the limits of where they can go  Fatigued from hours of forest walking, they have taken refuge in a haunted house, abandoned since 1972, they now know that at any moment the story could stop  The film could disintegrate, and they…

Slightly tipsy, walking out of Hongbin Tower. Two hearses appear on the bike lane. The invisible corpse, shut in a hand-pushed metal box covered with black brocade, jingles, bangs and clatters, squeezing through the onrush of head-spinning traffic.  Tightly-packed pedestrians scatter loosely in the smog, all eyeing him, intent on helping him find an opening.…