Shanghai, 1935
In your role for New Women, you played Wei Ming,
a single mother, novelist, who dies as she declares
she wants to live. In your dream, Wei Ming lived,
kneeling at her daughter’s grave. You reach through
the celluloid to try and touch her, but the screen turns
dark, then bright with waves. Interrogate the Suzhou River:
why drown the shore? Why? Entire shorelines of new women
surge, ebb, turn to foam. You see their limbs in the water,
thrashing, with nowhereto go. You can’t save
them, touch them, make their feral grief any more
endurable. Instead, they vanish. Instead, they recede.
Laundry baskets scatter, upturned, laundry piles
on the rooftops, laundry in the snow. You subsist on spit,
spite, spotlight. You subsist on fright, moving
across your face like a freight train over frozen tracks.
Who carries you across the four-poster bed, the medicine
cabinet, the pot of porridge? All you wanted was the lie
where the beautiful disobedient ones survive.
Soon their absence becomes your own. Your cigarette
lights the frigid air, burning a hole in the landscape.
Leave a Reply