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2 Poems by Feng Sun Chen

Feng Sun Chen

by Feng Sun Chen

WAKE: the eighth of 72 transformations

Wukong, protector of hollows,
squeezed his eyes into needles.
At age twenty he had accepted his fate
to be exiled into a unique freedom.
Distilled from beginning stone, this blood
must transform into anything.
His voice, a crescent of fugitive smiles.
His arrival, an apparition.
While riding on the rail he read wonder comics. He felt that
he understood the german scientist made of vapor.
He liked the dotted way color, dark and light
ransomed living characters on flat surface.
Their dyed bodies melded into one another.
Running his fingers over their flammability,
his hot monkey suit weighed on him.
Panic dripped from his in-between pores.
As he stepped through the sighing doors he felt the seeds
of what it is to touch unfiltered happiness,
light skating on the domed heads of nude humanity.
As the crowd surged around him, dragging with them
inadvertent simian hairs,
his insides sunk on the burnt edge,
synapses stretched like dawn on the bed sheet,
soul in blood on floss rushing with water
down the metal esophagus. He could be many. He could be all.
He could be anything, nobody, an army of moths
surfacing the electric cocoon.
Anything but one.

CLOUD DANCING

In mixing with the thinnest atmosphere
he came into a special power
and took large masses of cloud into his arms like children.
Maybe it would snow.
One of the elders had gone stiff.
Wukong had watched him die.
They sat behind the drape of waterfall, faces dusking.
He thought of Adonis.
Adonis dying, perhaps posed neatly on a slab of marble,
hands content with themselves, not to own
their perfection, and now to release it.
You cannot release what you do not have. This logic
pained him and echoed between far peaks.
Climbing to the summit of the highest mountain,
Wukong thought to achieve a productive anger.
He ripped out a fistful of fur, chewed on it,
flung it like ashes to the dull wind.
They would become an army of protectors,
a swarm of selves. For this he related most to bees.
The was an intake of rare breath, twin dust motes for each flake
that closed on them
before mixing with his emergency,
and the dark animal body
confused by cold and the tiny bleached points
of hard water
slipped quietly into flight.

 

 

Feng Sun Chen is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota (starting this fall, in poetry), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in nthposition, Pop Serial, So and So Magazine, Illumination, Vellum, and Paper Skin Glass Bones. Her website is fengsunchen.com.

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Sketch #1: Denise Levertov-Aware

by Serena Tome



“When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.”
                        Were they speaking of unconquered
                        land they wanted to possess? Whether
                        in flesh form or granulated rock, could
                        these militant strategists desire to
                        take over the remaining breaths on hold for you?
                        Their shadows hustle behind folic skirts like
                        Viet Cons awaiting your arrest—

“I like the sounds of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open the door by
fractions, eavesdrop peacefully.”

When impeding upon the sacred
remember to take off your shoes
bow your eyelids
and speak in the most widely respected
language on Earth—silence

Serena Tome launched an international reading series for African children to connect, learn, and participate in literary activity with students from around the world via video conferencing. She has literary work published and/or forthcoming in, Ann Arbor Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, Word Riot, Calliope Nerve, Counterexample Poetics, The Stray Branch, and other publications. Her first chapbook is forthcoming with Differentia Press. You can find out more about Serena at www.serenatome.blogspot.com.

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Traxia

by Michelle Reale



The train was persistent. It was due to come through again. In a room shaped like an octagon, the corners of which reminded her of Rome (a place she’d never been) she pretended she, too, was just passing through. Forget the fact that her feet housed the splinters from the floorboards she’d been walking for years. Or the fact that every time the train passed to a place she’d never go, the  faces of friends she’d never met  stared out of yellowed windows and waved as if she were the ‘must see ‘ attraction along the way.  And at night (though sometimes in the morning, too) she’d close the thick lids of her eyes and hum “gone, gone, gone.” Then the train would come by with its smoke and its clickety-clack and the sound of the steely tracks like blades in an old time movie, reminding her of all the places she’d never go, locations were all the same to her in their mystery. Still, the people would wave, and point, and photograph her. Later, they’d speak of her as if she were nothing more than a ghost. No more than a woman of indeterminate age living in a home by the tracks whose corners reminded her of Rome.  Everyone would be simply passing through. If she had a voice, she’d like to say that everything considered, it was still the silence she loved. But the train would keep coming. She would dare the people to believe her she was okay exactly the way she was and would remain so. If only they would stay long enough to look around, to stay a bit and  reason the whole thing out for themselves.

Michelle Reale’s works have been published in a variety of venues including Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Word Riot, Monkeybicycle, Eyeshot and others. Her fiction chapbook, Natural Habitat, will be published by Burning River in April 2010.