Illustration by Sarula Bao
Are you an unspoken word
or a dead posture
An unspoken sentence—
See you in Beijing
said one hand waving
to the mirror
getting cold—and
“missing you”
You were always missing
The blue was blowing
freely
through our unwashed hair
that month
entering the guiltiest
stage of life
Afraid of ghosts
with sour apricot faces
inverting
their names
The dead are homonym
The dead recommend
crossing
back
Some forms will dis-
inherit
their speaker
over time
still
Describe well the light
that wakes
another morning
to eat its fill
of ash
Author’s Note: Every year for the Yulan Festival (Ghost Festival, Gui Jie, Zhongyuan Jie), the dead come to visit, disavowing the boundary line between our world and theirs, and they’re hungry. It’s a beautiful fantasy, really, that the ultimate threshold, the supposedly unconquerable border which should only be crossable in one direction, would be dissolved and powerless. So, this September, I had been wondering: what would the dead recommend? What disrespect for borders? What freedom to move, to gather, to say that not even Living and Dead are nations worth preserving.
